The Devil's Highway, By Luis Alberto Urrea

Growing up, I enjoyed family bookshelves which were just as stocked with cookbooks as they were with serial killer encyclopedias. Even before I could fully read all its components, I absorbed information from my mom’s collection, scrutinizing crime scene photos I shouldn’t have and piecing cakes together from the fragments of recipes I could understand. In my parents’ eyes, my reading preferences were on par with flipping through a Magic Treehouse book: as long as I learned and remained relatively un-traumatized, they encouraged me to learn about the world through diverse, oftentimes conflicting, dimensions of storytelling. This approach forged the reader I am today and fostered my love for the duality of written worlds. My younger reading
Similar to In Cold Blood, this novel tackles a real-life tragedy in brutally exquisite, personal detail. Urrea’s chapter-long description of the tortuous process in which the living men’s bodies bake, wither, and decompose in the desert heat still haunts me to this day. As a reader, I’m enraptured by his characterization of all parties involved as living, breathing, flawed, greedy, humorous, wicked, and selfless people. While it often becomes a difficult space to navigate, I feel truly at home in this swath between the complexity of real life and the beauty of prose in which authors like Capote and Urrea weave their
Part of why I enjoy whimsical fiction novels so much is because their wit and fantasy hook me into a narrative which I incorporate into my view of the world. Robert Rankin’s The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse is crude, dark, and filled with humor that ranges from highly inappropriate to downright weird. Stepping into the novel’s grim, oddball world required a shift in mindset as a reader. I learned to love unlovable characters, make sense of a nonsensical murder mystery plot, and, most importantly, enjoy myself. I may not have digested the complexity of real life events when I read such novels, but I learned to work backwards. Instead of bringing previous knowledge and complicated feelings into a novel, I left all that at the door, and siphoned off the characters’ dark humor and unconventional world views back into my life. Fantasy and far-fetched fiction will always be dear to my heart because they provide a true give-and-take relationship; I find myself leaving a Harry Potter book or swashbuckling pirate adventure like Cinnamon and Gunpowder equipped with a sharper eye for the odd, humorous, and