THOMAS H. McNEELY

"This extraordinarily powerful novel-in-stories takes Philip Larkin's famous dictum – "They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do" – and brings it to harrowing life. In prose as clear and flawless as the Texas sky, McNeely paints an indelible portrait of emotional harm, following Buddy's journey from an innocent boy trapped in the fallout of a toxic marriage, to an alcoholic artist-in-love, to a damaged man who finds he will "always be his father's son." The story "Tickle Torture," alone, is worth the price of this book. McNeely is one of the least gimmicky, most emotionally insightful writers around, and Pictures of the Shark sneaks up on you, stealthily, to devastating effect."

- Eric Puchner, author of Last Day on Earth and Model Home

“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, author of Steplings, Buffalo Nickel, Understanding Women

“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, author of What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers and Fabrications: New and Selected Stories

“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, author of Barefoot Dogs

“A beautifully crafted collection of urban Texas stories with an overall novelistic development of character and emotional drama. In different stories, a boy caught between divorcing or divorced parents is used by and uses them against each other. The father makes his son an accomplice by taking his mistress along on their vacation trip. Just pre-teen, a version of the boy knows something is wrong with his relation to his clinging mother. Another version, an adolescent son of divorce is obsessed with a girl for her intact family, which he imagines as better than he knows it is. The focus on loss, obsession, illusion, and compulsion opens up to a wider if also painful world when the alcoholic male protagonist is seen through a college girlfriend’s perspective as she acknowledges his emotional abuse of her, prodded by a woman whom both the protagonist and his girlfriend think is socially beneath the girlfriend. The last story seems to offer a kind of hope for the emotionally disheveled protagonist, as he glimpses that ‘it had’—whatever exactly it is to him just then—‘nothing to do with me.’”

—Elizabeth Harris, author of The Ant Generator and Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman

“Pictures of the Shark: Stories by Thomas H. McNeely is a linked collection that resembles Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. Both are about addicted, self-destructive men, but McNeely’s protagonist tries to know himself by facing his shadow side. We watch him, wounded by his father’s narcissism and neglect, grow into a man who knows he has similar faults. He can’t distinguish between what is real and what he desires. He’s a writer searching for truth but creating in order to lose himself. He claims to practice negative capability but lapses into the same dark patterns. Pictures of the Shark is the profound and engaging study of a man who looks deeply into himself but is unable to resist the pull of fate.”

—Nan Cuba, author of Body and Bread