American Elsewhere
Shirley Jackson Award 2013.
From the acclaimed author of Mr. Shivers and The Company Man comes a haunting tale of modern America.
Ex-cop Mona Bright has been living a hard couple of years on the road,
but when her estranged father dies, she finds she's had a home all
along: a little house her deceased mother once owned in Wink, New
Mexico.
And though every map denies Wink exists, Mona finds
they're wrong: not only is Wink real, it is the perfect American small
town, somehow retaining all the Atomic Age optimism the rest of world
has given up on.
But the closer Mona gets to understanding her
mother's past, the more she begins to understand that the people in Wink are very, very different - and what's more, Mona begins to recognize
her own bond to this strange place, which feels more like home every
day.
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Robert Jackson Bennett
In the shifting terrain of modern fantasy, Robert Jackson Bennett stands out not for the worlds he builds, but for the questions he refuses to let go unanswered. His stories don’t just transport readers—they confront them. What if gods could die, and their corpses still held sway over history? What if magic were reduced to a language—a programming code etched into reality—and power came from those who knew how to rewrite the rules?
Born in 1984 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and raised in the outskirts of Houston, Bennett grew up roaming the in-between spaces—construction sites, empty fields, drainage ditches. Places where things were half-finished or half-forgotten. That sense of the liminal—the not-quite-here, not-quite-normal—echoes in everything he writes. He later studied English at the University of Texas at Austin, but it wasn’t academia that shaped his narrative instincts—it was curiosity, the kind that turns over every rock just to see what’s writhing beneath.
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