Order TALES FROM THE HOLY LAND here
Fiction is the sport of emotions. Each audience has its own quirks, but ultimately everyone does it for the same reason: these moments that transcend the fabric of our reality. These moments are spare and unpredictable, because they are impossible to manufacture. The few courageous authors who deliberately try to set the passion of their audience ablaze are a spirited bunch, but they created a different and much more dramatic storytelling paradigm. I don't think Rafael Alvarez wanted his short story collection TALES FROM THE HOLY LAND to be so winding and emotional, but the result is an unwittingly lyrical and operatic love letter to one of the most fascinating cities in America: Baltimore.
The very purpose of TALES FROM THE HOLY LAND is its complex and timeless setting. The real protagonist of Rafael Alvarez's stories is always Baltimore. Setting as character is always ambitious and in this case, like it's often the case with short story collections, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I thought the first half of the collection worked better because the characters are (mostly) unrelated and it feels like taking a walk through the streets of Baltimore over different eras, the city changes and develops before your eyes as you keep reading. In that regards, the first half of TALES FROM THE HOLY LAND works very well as it feels like a long, multigenerational sequence take.
Rafael Alvarez can really write. The quality of his sentences and concepts alone can really get to you. My favorite story in TALES FROM THE HOLY LAND was Junie Bug, about a young man trying to find his father's body in Baltimore's infamous Leakin Park where an obscene amount of bodies are buries. It's a clever story that doesn't lead to the obvious conclusion, unlike others in the collection where Alvarez telegraphs his intentions using a thesis statement in the beginning. I didn't connect with the Basilio stories, which are the second half of TALES FROM THE HOLY LAND, but it was a personal taste thing. I thought Rafael Alvarez tries to cover too much ground with one character, and he ended up coming off as annoyingly soulful.
TALES FROM THE HOLY LAND had a lot to live up to. I've read tremendous short stories this year, some of the best shorts I've ever read in my life, by authors like Jordan Harper, Cameron Pierce and Tiffany Scandal. While I didn't think TALES FROM THE HOLY LAND could exactly compare to these, I thought that its conceptual nature and the cohesiveness of its intent gave the collection a strong enough identity despite that the stories themselves were pretty hit or miss for me. I liked TALES FROM THE HOLY LAND although I didn't fall in love with it. It's something I'd say you should read with a precise purpose in mind. It's a great example of setting as character, but it falls a bit short of its goal of setting passions ablaze.