When You're Down By the River

by Christopher Lowe

The quartet of stories in WHEN YOU'RE DOWN BY THE RIVER track sons and daughters, couples pushed to their breaking point, and lost souls trying desperately to make their lives new.

Advance Praise:

“In these wonderful stories resonating with backwoods wisdom, Lowe shines a light on the plights of lost souls and sinners, pilgrims, backsliders and would be pro-wrestlers. Reading these tales, I felt often like an intruder, an interloper bearing witness to what no one should be seeing. It was unsettling, disturbing, and richly rewarding.”
-Neil Connelly, author of The Midlife Crisis of Commander Invincible and Buddy Cooper Finds a Way


“Christopher Lowe has written a stunning quartet in When You’re Down By the River. So ragged and raw are these protagonists, their hearts’ beatings turned wild. Betrayal, retribution, ruined love and ruined bodies, just how mutable the self’s ills can be—the themes are as old and primal as the species. In Lowe’s nimble hands, we abandon ourselves to every beat of his characters’ reckless hearts, and even happily take them for our very own.”
-Nicole Louise Reid, author of So There! and In the Breeze of Passing Things

“There is something magical about reading a piece of fiction that fills you up with vivid imagery, and trueness of character, and sense of place, so much that you are simply swept into the current of participating in the world created. That is what it is like to read Christopher Lowe. Each sentence rings of his talent and each story takes you somewhere that you want to stay.”
-Michael Farris Smith, author of Rivers and The Hands of Strangers

72 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 2014

About the author

Christopher Lowe is the author of THOSE LIKE US, a collection of interlocking short fiction published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press and WHEN YOU'RE DOWN BY THE RIVER, a fiction chapbook from BatCat Press. Born and raised in Jackson Mississippi, he received his undergraduate education at Mississippi University for Women and his graduate education at McNeese State University, where he earned an MFA in creative writing. Currently, he teaches at McNeese, where he's a faculty member in the MFA program. His fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry have appeared widely in magazines and journals including Third Coast, Baltimore Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Grist, and War, Literature, and the Arts. He is nonfiction editor for Midway Journal, an assistant fiction editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal, and a fiction reader for Electric Literature‘s Recommended Reading series. He lives happily in Lake Charles, LA with his wife and daughter.

Reviews

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

This gorgeous collection bursts with spirit and place. Deeply rooted in the South, each one of the four stories is uniquely crafted in a different narrative style. The language is sparse and poetic. Lowe trusts his readers with almost unbearable silences, the resounding roar of all the things left unsaid, that a less skilled writer would have ruined with chatter. The result is a vivid yet intimate glimpse of these characters in all their beautiful, broken glory. The lasting power of these ordinary lost souls and their palatable yearning is how recognizable Lowe has made them. They could be our neighbors, our friends, our families. Even ourselves, perched on the cusp of being swept away.