Bury This

Praise for Bury This The violent murder of a young innocent underpins Andrea Portes's second novel [and she] tells this tale of violence in spiraling prose. Her empathy shies away from nothing in the tangled lives of this small Michigan town, with a young girl tied up tight in the center...Bury This doesn't breathe life into Krause to titillate us but to allow us to participate in the mystery -- of her death, yes, but also of her life and of small-town America. Portes takes a tale of personal tragedy and marries it to one of national weight. Throughout, her writing about this dirty, awful thing is so fresh it falls on readers bright and clean as north-country snow. ---- New York Times Book Review If one could hear novelist Andrea Portes at work typing, I think the keystrokes might sound something like machine-gun fire: rapid, furious bursts of word bullets, aimed directly at the reader's heart and wasting no extra ammunition in getting there... Portes captures the fetid, dark essence of Bury This: some people's seemingly unquenchable, monstrous thirst to destroy beauty. Amazingly though, in writing about it, Portes also creates something wondrous, like the glow of a single jellyfish, floating gloriously amid an endlessly dark ocean. -- Dallas Morning News Andrea Portes is a natural, and she creates a fever dream with Bury This. Portes writes with such cool grace we almost forget to be astonished by her narrative's complexity. Bury This is exhilarating, a raw, gripping, wintry Gothic, a less patrician--and perhaps more shattering--version of Donna Tartt's The Secret History. Read it and be transfixed. --Matthew Specktor, American Dream Machine Witty, gothic, sparse, and poetic at its heart, Bury This is a page turner from the first sentence and a journey into the dark mysteries of the human condition. --Frank Bill, Crimes in Southern Indiana and Donnybrook Andrea Portes writes with the tip of a knife, shap