Storytellers Tim Tingle and Doc Moore are back, just in time for Halloween, with More Spooky Texas Tales (Texas Tech University Press, $18.95 hardcover).
Tingle and Moore teamed up on two other books from Texas Tech Press – Spooky Texas Tales (also for young readers) and Texas Ghost Stories: Fifty Favorites for the Telling.In More Spooky Texas Tales they relate 10 stories, including:
“Skinwalker” – a man picks up a hitchhiker only to discover that his passenger is not human.
“The Chupacabra and Berto” – a bloodthirsty creature haunts the Valley, and a grandson wanders off the ranch.
“Screaming Banshee Cattle of the Night Swamp” involves fang-bearing cattle in the swamps near Orange, Texas.
“Mary Culhaine” – a girl has to give a graveyard creature a piggyback ride to town and is offered a bowl of bloody oatmeal to eat.
Tingle and Moore perform at schools and libraries, telling and collecting stories. Several of the stories in the book were first told to them by students.
HOME FRONT: Sylvia Dickey Smith’s novel, A War of Her Own (Crickhollow Books, $16.95 ), is set in the summer of 1943 in Orange.
The story features Bea Meade, a young mother whose no-good husband announces he is leaving her for another woman. To support her infant son, she takes a job as a riveter at the shipyards.
It truly is a war of her own for Bea, who has to come to grips with mysteries from her past while fighting prejudice against women in the workplace and other personal and social challenges.
AN AUTHOR’S YEAR: Susan Wittig Albert is the author of the popular China Bayles mysteries, which always have the name of an herb in the title, as well as numerous other books.
Now she tells about a year in the life of an author in An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days (University of Texas Press, $24.95 hardcover). The year was 2008, a year of financial crises and political change, and she includes various news developments and her reaction to them.
Basically, it is a daily diary by a very talented writer who is willing to share her private thoughts publicly.
She also includes in the margins a lot of food for thought from other writers and sources in quotations that she has collected.
Her days may have been ordinary, but certainly the year wasn’t, nor is her writing about it.
