Growing Up Dead in Texas

by Stephen Graham Jones

It was a fire that could be seen for miles, a fire that split the community, a fire that turned families on each other, a fire that it's still hard to get a straight answer about. A quarter of a century ago, someone held a match to Greenwood, Texas's cotton.

Stephen Graham Jones was twelve that year. What he remembers best, what's stuck with him all this time, is that nobody ever came forward to claim that destruction. And nobody was ever caught. Greenwood just leaned forward into next year’s work, and the year after that's, pretending that the fire had never happened. But it had. This fire, it didn't start twenty-five years ago. It had been smoldering for years by then. And everybody knew it. Getting them to say anything about it's another thing, though. Now Stephen's going back. His first time since high school, and maybe his last. For answers, for closure, for the people who can't go back. The ones who never got to leave.

Part mystery, part memoir, Growing Up Dead in Texas is packed with more secrets than your average graveyard. Stephen Graham Jones' breakout novel is a story about farming. A story about Texas. A story about finally standing up from the dead and walking away.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Mystery, Audiobook, Indigenous, Thriller, Contemporary

254 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 30, 2012

About the author

Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author thirty-five or so books. He really likes werewolves and slashers. Favorite novels change daily, but Valis and Love Medicine and Lonesome Dove and It and The Things They Carried are all usually up there somewhere. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado. It's a big change from the West Texas he grew up in.

Reviews

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful book. Has all the flavor of memoir and all the miracle of fiction. I loved this book. -- Joe R. Lansdale

I liked this book a lot, but I would need the text to try and explain. The story winds back and forth thru past and present, a blend of memory and mystery. The year that Hot Wheels came out is more important than I ever realized. Despite the title and other books by the author, this isn't horror. There are no werewolves or slashers. I noticed the reviews are love or hate, so no promises.

[Matt Falvey · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Quentin Tarantino and Cormac McCarthy crossed paths in a rundown whiskey bar just north of the Rio Grande, this is the book that backroad's connection would have produced. It's a novel, wrapped in mystery, dipped in autobigraphy with a dash of investigative journalism about Stephen Graham Jones' return to his hometown and the unintended ripples of a fire from his childhood that ripped the community apart and splintered the ties between ages-old families. It's a story of the fire, but it isnt. It's small town Texas ideals, dusty boots, and cotton bales. Its tragedy and re-opened wounds. It's truth being brought to light and ancient skeletons finally given their proper burial. Above all "Growing Up Dead in Texas" is a remarkable novelized memoir that stays with you like a rattlesnake bite.

[Matthew Vaughn · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do I convince people how great this book is and get them to want to read it? Short of saying ‘You need to read this book’ over and over again I will try to say something that expresses how much you should read it.
On the surface it’s about a fire that took out twenty-five modules of cotton. That is a major topic throughout the book, but it’s just the beginning. In almost three hundred pages we are shown life in the small town of Greenwood, and follow Stephen Graham Jones as he pieces together all the events that followed that fire.
If you’ve read anything by SGJ then I don’t need to say that his writing is superb. But in this novel he goes beyond anything I’ve read from him before. It’s stellar, it’s awesome, or maybe it deserves a new word created just to describe it. This isn’t a start at point A and end up at point B kind of book though. We are introduced to situations in chapter one that seem innocent at a glance, but when we revisit them in chapter eleven we understand the true meaning. He slips through various tales with ease. He stops one story in chapter two with ‘and that’s how I want to leave them for now.’, and picks it back up in chapter three after filling in some gaps and interjecting bits about himself from this time period.
This is a book about Hot Wheels, it’s also about telephones and calling people. It’s about the tournament game short, not one, but two players. It’s about family, family that has been lost and family that you protect. It doesn’t really matter what I say this book is about, you should just read it.

[Gina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I almost hated this book. A friend said it's like ADD in print, and that's true, but it's worse than that.

1. A hint to writers: if you're going to make your narrator a professional writer, he needs to be able to write. With sentences and coherent thoughts and those kinds of things. For an example of how this is done, see Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. If your narrator is going to write with ridiculous sentence fragments and no sense of plot or timing or anything useful, say he's anything but a professional writer.

2. Um, what? What just happened? What time are you recalling now? Who the heck is this person? Where are we... Wait now we're here? With whom? And what year are you suddenly telling me about? What the hell did that last sentence mean? These were my thoughts during the first chapter. And all 10 chapters that followed. Repeat what I just wrote 100 times in your head and you've experienced reading this book. I don't think I've ever actually rolled my eyes while reading. Before this.

3. I read all 250 pages, and I have only some idea what happened. I was counting on it coming clear at the end. Which was silly, given that nothing is clear ever in the rest of the book. I admit that I'm not always the most astute reader, and rarely the first to figure out the culprit in a mystery. But I am intelligent enough that I usually know what happened after I've read the whole thing, for goodness sake.

The author is good at one thing, which is creating a place. Rural Texas was essentially one of the characters in this book, and possibly the only well written one.

[Jeffrey Caston · Rating 2 out of 5]

My intro to SGJ's work. Did not, unfortunately, care for this one. It had nothing that hooked me in. I kept waiting for it to become exciting, immersive, or even interesting. It never happened. I could never really focus on it. It just never clicked. And also unfortunately, I found the narration completely lifeless.

I know he's got other books, so I know I will try something else too. No worries.

[Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone will tell you they don't know what's real versus fabricated in this memoir. Even the author does a lot of backtracking and correcting and apologizing, to protect the innocent and the not-so. To reframe scenes from another viewpoint with more insight, some backstory that needed context, that so-and-so's father had been a you-know-what, or cheated someone out of their inheritance, or once upon a time was sweet on the wrong girl. Half these characters are in the ground now, but those who survived this pastiche of anecdotes aren't lucky enough to have WITSEC covering their tracks, so their names have been changed. Maybe. Present-day reunion interviews add some levity and hindsight to the proceedings, which are otherwise rendered (or obscured — wonderfully, nostalgically, conversationally) through the recollecting eyes of a 12-year-old and his rifle sight, atop an ATV or from the sidelines at a basketball game between emergency-room visits. No one's asking him to remain objective, nor would it be nearly as affecting if he were. Just like how it can be tougher to sink those baskets from up close than the long-range jumpers. Yep, you buried it real good, Stephen.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

My mother lives in a nursing home. Most of the time, she is coherent and can tell me how she's feeling and even discuss current events. But sometimes, when she's tired or when she's just taken her medication, her conversations are very hard to follow. She changes subjects mid-sentence or starts talking about someone by first name who she hasn't previously introduced into the conversation. Reading Growing Up Dead In Texas, I had the impression it was written by my mother on one of her bad days.

I believe there is a good novel, possibly a great novel, buried somewhere in the pages of this book, but the narration is so maddening, with arbitrary shifts in narrative direction, that I was driven to distraction. Jones doesn't know enough to get out of his own way and just tell the story.

I've read many difficult books in my life, but no author, not Faulkner or Joyce, no one, has left me so thoroughly confused and frustrated with a story.

[Robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, I don't know what happened to my original review. So I will try to piece this together.

This was sort of a difficult read, it wandered about, but if you read carefully and took notes. I underlined stuff in my copy just to keep track. I started it audio and had to go get it in paper because I knew I wasn't going to be able to follow it properly without cliff notes.

I finished it several weeks ago, and just don't know where my review went... probably to review heaven.

4 stars

Happy Reading!

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn’t my favorite SGJ, but it was still a good listen. I have the advantage of living in rural West Texas, near where the book is set, so I could understand the stakes of the central mystery—a series of cotton fires set during ginning season that reveal deeper enmity within a small community—but Jones’ scorched-earth approach (no pun intended) made me nervous. He’s upfront about cutting ties with this community, his hometown, but considering the pervasiveness of vengeance in the narrative, I wonder about the wisdom of this decision. Jones really, really, really cuts ties, burns bridges, peels back layers, etc., so that I don’t think he’ll ever be able to go home or even look homeward ever again, something he may eventually regret. West Texas is such a fertile source of inspiration for his best work, and I think this expose may come back to haunt him. I hope not.

Other reviewers have noted the digressions, and I agree that they are troublesome. I do think SGJ is more effective as a fiction writer, but there’s compelling material here that requires a lot of context. West Texas is a quirky, often harsh place, but it does have a strange beauty that takes time to explain.

A good read/listen, but I felt he was too hard on a teacher who made sure all his books were in the school library.

[Audra (ouija.reads) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Growing Up Dead In Texas is the definition of blurring the lines. It is beautifully written in a truly distinct voice that could only belong to Stephen Graham Jones. Not only are you trying to figure out the mystery that the plot (sometimes) focuses on, you are also left trying to piece together what is memoir, and what is fiction. It is a mystery that never got solved and happened so far in the past, that it only remains in the memories of those who choose to dredge it up, even though they'd rather just keep on pretending it didn't happen. The narrative is often fragmented and sidetracked, but in such a way that you can switch seamlessly from one train of thought to the next without realizing you've done it until he returns to the original topic. It is a completely natural, almost raw storytelling and it carries a lot of weight, as you are caught between reality and what has just been made up in the author's mind. It is an investigation of truth and what it means to tell the truth or believe in what you've been told. In the end, it doesn't matter what is real and what isn't. If you get stuck on that, you're missing the point. It is the fact that the story makes you believe, that the reality is so intricately woven into the fiction that it becomes the truth. This book is the undeniable proof that stories can be real.

[Ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I need to read this quietly unsettling book again.

[David Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is so much to unpack in this book. Author Stephen Graham Jones takes readers back to his childhood, to a dusty Texas town where lives are lived one cotton module to the next, where famliies have been living and loving and lying to and about one another for generations. Parts of this are the results of conversations with people he has not seen in a very long time, talking about a mysterious fire that brought several deaths to the community... but even in those parts, it's about so much more.

There's a thing about Jones' writing that is on full display here, that is wonderful. He takes you into his head. He writes, thinks twice about things, seques into memories and back and it's not at all like fiction. It's like you are sitting around a fire somewhere, sipping something strong, and listening, as he tells a story. His voice is so strong it replaces the story with images that start to feel like your own memories.

This is very, very good book. It fits in between the cracks of genres, but stitches them together with a blunt needle and thick thread, letting the characters, thoughts and memories slip through the seams to other places. Mystery, memoir, alternate or corrected history? All of that.

Very highly recommended.

[Edward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man, this book is really hard for me to review. Especially in a way that expresses just how much you should be reading it. It's part mystery, part memoir. But the book reads like fiction. Jones pulls you into his West Texas like you've been living there your whole life. You see the road that a young teenage girl died on. You feel the cotton as you run through it during basketball conditioning. You witness the brutal beating of a young boy. Stephen Graham Jones has you right there with him listening to the stories of a different time. Feeling the loss of an entire community. Not just a cotton field but of family and friendships.

At times the book reads like a true-crime novel explaining things that happened long ago, secondhand. But he also sprinkles in dashes of his own childhood, things he was doing himself at the time which makes it read like a memoir.

Stephen Graham Jones is just a samurai at the written word and Growing Up Dead In Texas is a must read. Especially for hardcore fans and for anyone discovering him for the first time.

[Adam Cesare · Rating 5 out of 5]

Real review forthcoming...probably. In the mean time: holy s$*t, this book.

[Kim Lockhart · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is part memoir, part Southern Gothic noir. The central mystery is a device used by the author to reveal everything about the complex relationships in the small, tough, dusty West Texas town where he grew up. It's also at times extremely close up and intimate, with some keen insights into how the author's early life has influenced his writing. Some scenes are hard to take. Maybe you really do have to break the bones to get to the marrow? Suffice it to say that this is a great story, well-written, but at times not easily read, due to its visceral immersion into the core of the author's/narrator's experiences.

[Michael Seidlinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

From now on, whenever someone asks me what I think is the best piece of creative nonfiction it's going to be this book.

For a genre that's mired in contradiction and, at best, a hazy sense of "truth," Stephen Graham Jones successfully redefines creative nonfiction for all us still looking for a tether from which to hold on.

One of my favorites of 2012.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote a rather extensive review of this book the day I finished it, but due to an unfortunate turn of events, that review is gone forever, and I just can't quite bring myself to hammer out a mere imitation of it, so you'll get a more superficial treatment. This book affected me profoundly. My wife could tell when I'd been reading it because I was pensive, introspective, depressed even. My previous review was a deep dive into the feelings inspired by this remarkable book, my thoughts on the jarring revelations of childhood, and the nature of guilt and trauma. This review will be none of that, merely a quick overview of the book, and my highly conditional recommendation.

In short, this book is about a fire in a sparsely populated area of West Texas. The cotton waiting for the gin is destroyed by arson just before Christmas, and the perpetrator is never caught. The crime sets off a series of events that expose the town's hidden animosity, fierce loyalties, and unhealed wounds. This is all narrated by a fictional version of Stephen Graham Jones himself, returning to his home town to make sense of everything that happened. The story unfolds with all the twists and turns of an Agatha Christie novel, leading to a tremendously satisfying conclusion. It's a fantastic piece of storytelling, and it would be a disservice to you to reveal any more about the plot.

As you scroll through the reviews, you'll notice that a lot of people are unsure whether this is fiction or not. I'm fairly certain that it is, but their uncertainty gives you an idea of how real and sincere this book feels. I would recommend this book based on that alone. Most American media today is based either in cities or on people from the cities visiting the uneducated rubes out in the country. Sometimes it's romanticized, sometimes it's demonized, but it's virtually always condescending. When most people think small rural town, they either think Parks and Rec or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This book breaks away from all that. It's not an underdog story about the starry-eyed kid trying to escape his small town prison, or a travel log of the quaint countryside, or a self-righteous commentary on the backward views of these damn hicks. We have plenty of those. This was something else. Something special. It was just life. It was so perfectly authentic that I had to keep flipping back to the front cover to reread the comforting subtitle, "A Novel". It's American culture as it is never depicted on TV or in movies, and I wish that more people were exposed to it, or even suspected that it existed.

One of the common threads you'll see as you read reviews of this book, or any of Stephen Graham Jones's books, is that it is narratively very complex. Put on your big kid glasses; this one isn't going down without a fight. The story jumps through a hundred years, four generations, and dozens of characters, trying to describe the intricate web of relationships unique to small towns. There were times in the story that I honestly wished I had taken notes. It's all relevant though. I didn't feel like any of it was wasted. It's a roller coaster of a story, leaping back and forth and into little explanatory loop-de-loops that leave your head spinning. It's expertly done, though. One of the fascinating techniques he used was breaking from the story to tell a different, completely disconnected one, and jumping back into the story like nothing happened. What it did was alter the tone dramatically. For example, at one point he broke from one story to talk about the death of a childhood pet, then jumped right back into the main story. You were suddenly back in the same moment of the narrative, but now you're seeing it through a lens of sadness and remorse. Again, masterfully done. You will want to really buckle down to read this or it will throw you, but the reward is worth it.

As well crafted as this story is, it sure put me through the wringer. So much about this story is disturbing. There are truly gruesome things in this book, but they're made all the more distressing by the fact that they're not played for shock value. They're laid out for you as just one of those things. Sometimes people get hurt. Sometimes people die. Accidents happen, misunderstandings get out of hand, mistakes are made. It's just life. It really got to me because it reminded me so much of my home town. I'm sure kids die everywhere, not just in small towns, but man this hit close to home. It's not just the tragic happenstance either. The book brings up the parts of childhood we all work so hard to suppress. Can any of us even remember the first time we felt betrayal? What about the first time we really hurt someone? How about when we realized that the people we loved could be taken away? There were painful moments in growing up that we've pushed down and tried to forget, instead focusing on Christmases and baseball games and living carefree happy childhoods. This book confesses those moments, relives that grief. It's painful. I don't know how else to describe it. I once had anesthetic wear off in the middle of a surgery, felt the scalpel pressing through flesh, firmly to the bone. This felt like that. Agonizing, but necessary somehow.

So, let's talk about my recommendation. This book isn't fun, uplifting, or educational, at least not in a traditional sense. If that's what you're looking for, your princess is in another castle; keep looking. It is exceptionally well crafted, so students of the craft would probably profit from a detailed read of this book. It presents an incredibly authentic look at the culture of rural West Texas, and those who want to know more about their fellow Americans from circumstances dissimilar to their own would profit immensely from the exposure that this book offers. Finally, this book has a tremendous story, comparable to the great Agatha Christie in suspense and Dickens in complexity. However, whatever you get from this book will come at the price of an emotional harrowing that will not wear off soon.

Content advisory: This book contains all that is vicious, senseless, and evil, all told with realism and sincerity. There is gruesome disturbing content, sexual content, strong language, violence, and that's just the beginning. Not recommended for children.

[Mikey ಠ◡ಠ]

No disrespect to SGJ, I’m just doing a lot rn and need to take some books off my plate. Maybe next year I can come back to this

[Dev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Growing Up Dead in Texas does strange things to your head.
Stephen Graham Jones delivers a masterfully executed novel epic here, riffing on an American Gothic trip in his own inimitable and handsome style. The book bills itself as "part mystery, part memoir," but that pitch is really selling this short, as this should be, to me, a quintessential novel of coming of age in a small town, or of boyhood itself, much like (sourcing from my own ideal reading,) Harry Crews's A Childhood or Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.
The story here concerns Greenwood, Texas in 1985. The year's reap of cotton is burned to the ground. This act launches a long line of grief, paranoia, and retribution in the small farming community, a line that moves forward and back through generations.
The mystery, I think, while ultimately evocative, is more to appease our inner rational detective, I would traverse the events in the book easily without it, but it is necessary; the narrative is so rich and engaging that I could just as well crawl inside the wardrobe and live inside this world forever if it weren't for the confines of the mystery.
The play with the memoir framework may seem just that, what in the wake of James Frey and his ilk, and it is at times servicing catchy first-person lines and speaking metatextually on the tropes of non-fiction, a commentary to the memoir style (though I was more fraught with thoughts on the structure of true crime and A&E TV specials than memoirs,) but it serves a much deeper purpose than that. (I point out that Jones himself is present more as narrator than actual character, physically doing things and going places, in the book.) What this does is it obliterates the constraints in our minds of the tag "fiction." This story, however fictionalized it may be, is much more than that. It allows us to uninhibitedly believe everything. And it allows Jones to, through the guise of fiction, be completely honest. Because the whole truth never makes complete sense. Fiction, however, does.
What really lets Jones pull this off is the beautiful, intimate voice of the book. It's that sort of big, hushed yelling someone does when they commentate you sinking the shot that wins the fictive championship game that's, in reality, just taking place on the playground court. It allows you to see this place and these characters, to remember the feel of them against your skin. What it does is it, ever so quietly, cuts open your head and supplants the whole thing in your memory.
I've had this happen before with a Stephen Graham Jones, this authorial honesty compounds with gripping plot to form a beautiful, grotesque concoction that makes me devour the book so fast that it leaves burnt rubber in the meat of my throat. When I think back on these books, I truly think I experienced them. That it's just another scar I collected running through the woods in my childhood. I can run my fingers through my hair and find a place where the skin's grown back soft and knotted, and think of the time I was running too fast through Greenwood, Texas in 1985.

[Sarah H · Rating 3 out of 5]

50 States: Texas

I had trouble following this, but I blame that on myself being both easily distracted and having straight zero knowledge of farms, farming equipment or cars. If I had read it in print instead of audio and had a list of characters/King family tree at the front, I would have been ok. But it did come together at the end. I'll try rereading it eventually.

It does a great job of establishing the rural west Texas setting, extra interesting to me because my husband is descended from west Texas cotton farmers.(This book is set in the same time/place as one of my fave books, Friday Night Lights.)

[Christopher Novas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A memoir disguised under the beggars cloth of a fiction novel.

Does it matter?

Livelihoods gone, and sins piled on top of sins eaten by the fields in West Texas. We fall into the childhood of Stephen Graham Jones, and the community in which he was born and grew up in. Names change, but the truth is still there burning under a cotton field. The words have more truth, more pulling gravity than anything I've ever read.

It's a detective novel where the author is the detective himself gathering information from the people who were there, friends, relatives, etc. Pulling and pushing with time, readers are thrown into a vortex of past and present, where the mystery begins to unfold and folds within, destroying your concept of what's “real” and what's “fiction”.

Greenwood, Texas is a real place. Bodies are buried, and ghosts still haunt, found just beyond the fire.

If you want an example of how to infuse your worldly experiences with fiction, this just might be your primer.

[Diane · Rating 1 out of 5]

When i first saw the title i thought it might be a zombie novel. But the book blurb described it as a mystery. The author had come back looking for answers about a fire at a cotton gin 25 years ago. I think there was supposed to be a story in there somewhere, but I'm not sure it was worth what you had to go thru to find it. The cover says it is a novel, but its told as though its the author's memoir. He spends half his time telling you how he changed names and the other half jumping around from one recollection to the next. Way too may characters to keep straight, especially since there was no character development. Not sure why I bothered to finish it.

[Joy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best way to describe this book is "kinda". It's kinda interesting, kinda entertaining and kinda relatable.

There's also some kinda horrific violence to animals in it that almost made me chuck the thing, but I just skipped over it. I kept reading was because I kinda related to almost all of the characters. The things that happen to rural kids, especially farm kids, is kinda universal. I saw some pretty awful things, same as the author. I could also kinda hear that laid back voice in the back of my head.

Kinda. So I kept reading.

[Rich · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was excited to read this because it related to the area but his writing was hard to mesh with. The book and story hit close to where I am in West Texas and Midland but even when he described stuff I was familiar with, I never connected with it. While a potentially a good story, it just wasn't a match for me.

[Joy-Marie Karahkwiio 🍉 Canadian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really struggled with this book but it’s because I listened to the audiobook. My adhd cannot handle this type of audiobook and if I had known that from the start I would’ve gotten a physical copy. I’m gonna reread this book at a later date and will most likely rate it a 4-5 star.

[Ian Butler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent read. good characters and plot with a good ending. Highly recommended.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

A.D.D. in print.

[John Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up because I loved The Only Good Indian and Mongrels. It was an unexpected surprise for sure! Maybe more non-fiction than fiction, maybe? 😆 The monsters are real.

[Jill Bowman · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a good book. This one is very unlike the other two Jones books I’ve read (no ghosts or slashers), but warning - pay attention. I’m about to do something I’ve never done before.
I listened to this book from Hoopla and I still have 17 days on the ‘borrow’. A day or two from now I’m going to start all over again. There was so much happening and so many characters… I want to listen again and be sure I’ve gotten every single nuanced word! (Perhaps with a character list. A family tree, if you will. And I won’t be cleaning and mowing the lawn this time! It’s just too good.

Although this book is not horror like the other ones I’ve read it’s horror in its own way. The horror of small town, insular life.

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started thinking this was going to be a horror story, I started reading because I knew the author was from Midland Tx, and I grew up 30 mins away. While it’s not my typical read, I can’t give it two stars because it was well written and I enjoyed reading about the places I grew up around. Jones also knows how to tick off someone from Big Spring, he added an S to the end. “Big Springs” would anger any native, this made me giggle.