An East Side Houston native, THOMAS H. McNEELY has published short stories and non-fiction in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, Ploughshares, and many other magazines and anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories and Algonquin Books’ Best of the South. His stories have been short-listed for the Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Award anthologies. He has received National Endowment for the Arts, Wallace Stegner, and MacDowell Colony fellowships for his fiction. His first book, Ghost Horse, won the Gival Press Novel Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize in Writing. He currently teaches in the Stanford Online Writing Studio and at Emerson College, Boston.
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A sudden snowfall in Houston reveals family secrets. A trip to Universal Studios to snap a picture of the shark from Jaws becomes a battle of wills between father and son. A midnight séance and the ghost of Janis Joplin conjure the mysteries of sex. A young boy’s pilgrimage to see Elvis Presley becomes a moment of transformation. A young woman discovers the responsibilities of talent and freedom.
“McNeely’s octet of stories in Pictures of the Shark makes a marvelous, loose-limbed novel charting the agonized path of a single son, Buddy Turner, as he anxiously and intently watches his parents’ marriage fall apart, and the damage to his soul and self lasts far into his young adulthood. With masterful prose, McNeely draws you down into emotional depths where your ambivalence and confusion show you at your most profoundly human. These stories hook you quickly and deeply and keep you even after they end.”
—C.W. Smith
“McNeely’s brilliant stories are filled with delicious menace and heartbreaking hope. The characters in McNeely’s stories are terrified of the unknown, even as they suspect they know more than they should—about a father’s lies, his other women, a mother’s desperate yearnings, the perils of alcohol, and the terrifying bonds of love.”
—Pamela Painter
“Pictures of the Shark is a profound meditation on the limits of familial love and the uncontrollable forces that shape a man’s heart. In these gorgeously crafted interlinked stories, Thomas H. McNeely demonstrates once again an uncanny ability to illuminate the darkest emotional corners of his characters with a vision that is as tender and compassionate as it is unflinching.”
—Antonio Ruiz-Camacho
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