The Darker: Tales of a City Different

These rough-cut tales from Santa Fe author Jaramillo paint a grim portrait of disenfranchised native New Mexicans. New money Santa Fe enrages locals like the young Hispanic narrator of "Whisper of a Spider," whose alcohol-and-resentment-fueled tirades are about all there is of him. ("I always feel oppressed no matter what," he bemoans, when thrown out of a bar.) In another dispiriting first-person tale, a young man acts as a gigolo ("a very lucrative endeavor in Santa Fe for a young virulent Latin spic") to a woman he calls the Brit—one in legions of "wealthy older lonely desperate white women residing in the subterranean foothills... [and] willing to pay for a young brown man's superior sex organ." Both act out in increasingly ugly, destructive ways. "Spirit of Madness," the long, tedious, sad diary of a young man's slow death by drug addiction, records the obliteration of will and personality in the face of society's apathy. Uncouth and unvarnished, Jaramillo's speakers can all agree with the narrator of "Living Briefly in Paradox," who notes of his family: "We all knew we had no future in Santa Fe." (Nov.)