CORONADO
By Dennis Lehane

Kirkus Reviews (starred review) :

Tough-as-nails crime fiction transcends genre in this first collection of five stories and a play (developed from one of them) from the Boston-area novelist (Sacred, 1997, etc.).

One hopes Clint Eastwood (who directed the Oscar-winning film based on Lehane's superb Mystic River, 2001) will take a close look at "Running Out of Dog," a pungent slice of Southern Gothic noir populated by runaway canines, restless Vietnam vets and the alluring women who seduce them into one another's paths, fateful confrontations, and a savage fulfillment of its narrator's observation that "when hope comes late to a man, it's a dangerous thing." This one is a classic: Robert Stone at his most unrelenting, with nerve-grating additional material contributed by Jim Thompson and dialogue by George V. Higgins. Lehane shows his talent for narrative economy in a brisk tale of revenge for drug-induced manslaughter ("Mushrooms") and a surprisingly rich account ("Gone Down to Corpus") of Texas high-school football jocks trashing the elegant homes of their "betters," their destructive energies propelled by what the story's narrator calls "something . . . I'm mad at, something I can't put a name to." The taut, disturbing "Until Gwen" employs grating, accusatory second-person narration to explore the murderous bonds linking a soulless con man, his hapless son (and sometime accomplice) and Gwen, whose fate drives the story toward its excruciating conclusion. And if all this weren't sufficient evidence of Lehane's virtuosity, there's "Coronado" which expands "Until Gwen" into a two-act play (premiered in New York in 2005) that reshuffles its aforementioned characters into three doomed couples who enact a murderous and suicidal progression through dynamic action, detailed flashbacks and harrowing fantasy sequences. It's a knockout performance.

An impressive step forward for a writer of commanding gifts, who seems poised on the threshold of even greater accomplishment.

Library Journal (starred review) :

Long before he became well known for Mystic River (2001), Lehane was writing short stories and teaching creative writing. This modest-sized volume of five previously published stories and a two-act play aptly show off his talents. There's not a wasted word in these dark, spare tales about disenfranchised males of the South. "Until Gwen" moves like a chess game, pitting a heartbroken Bobby against his amoral father. Readers can appreciate it even more after reading Coronado. The play brings seemingly unrelated characters together in a bar (plenty of drinking and gun toting in these stories), and Lehane cleverly weaves them together, watching to see if we can figure out the crime. Just what is the ultimate crime ("What's worse than murder?" asks one character) might be the author's main theme, as Bobby, Elgin, Blue, and the others repeatedly flail against some tide they cannot control. Highly recommended for those who appreciate the psychological fiction of Pete Dexter and George Pelecanos and essential for libraries populated by aspiring screenwriters and playwrights.

Boston Herald:

Famous for such works as “Mystic River” and “A Drink Before the War,” one would think that Massachusetts author Dennis Lehane couldn’t possibly outdo himself. You’d be wrong.

Lehane’s newest book, “Coronado,” a collection of five short stories and a two-act play, is a brilliant, insightful and intriguing literary voyage. Lehane’s ability to create complex and believable characters using simple prose is his best asset, one that he uses to full advantage.

He starts off strong with the moody Southern drama “Running Out of Dog.” Set in rural South Carolina, this is a fascinating story of the relationship between two men - one, a disillusioned Vietnam veteran trying to make sense of life; the other, an unstable ne’er-do-well whose dangerous infatuation with a childhood friend threatens his life.

Lehane’s genius is in the intricacy of the relationship. He draws these characters so realistically that their eventual downfall is especially poignant.

Though a native of Dorchester, Lehane has a strong grasp of Southern life. The characters and the fictional town are finely sketched. Even more impressive is Lehane’s ability to touch upon some of the most fascinating aspects of the human condition: the devastating effects of poverty on the soul, the battle between hope and fate and the inexplicable nature of human sexuality.

“ICU,” a story detailing one man’s journey to learn the meaning of empathy and love, is one of the more fascinating pieces. Tipping its hat to Franz Kafka’s “The Trial,” “ICU” follows Daniel, a non-descript Everyman who is being followed by mysterious men in suits.

One gets the impression that Daniel is being judged, that the surreal circumstances surrounding him are meant to somehow force him to confront his shortcomings. Once again, Lehane allows this character to develop at his own pace and merely sets things in motion. Absent of any moralistic condemnation, Lehane’s approach to Daniel doesn’t seek to accomplish any social, political or moral agenda.

“Coronado: A Play in Two Acts” is Lehane’s masterpiece. Interweaving the lives of several bar patrons, the short story-turned-play is a clever and insightful exercise in observing human beings at their best and worst. And if the plot isn’t enough, Lehane throws in a few twists you don’t see coming.

“Coronado” is an exciting, frenetic read that draws you into the lives of characters, lifestyles and locales that are not only colorful but engaging. Locations are vivid and crisp, characters are memorable and, most importantly, the story lines dig into you and leave their mark.

Publishers Weekly:

Lehane (Mystic River) hints in the first of these five richly vernacular (and, save one, previously published) stories and one play that "a small town is a hard place to keep a secret." In "Running Out of Dog," two Vietnam vets return to their hometown of Eden, S.C., and become tragically entangled with the wife of a man whose rich family kept him out of the war. Class resentment similarly erupts in "Gone Down to Corpus," set in back-water Texas, 1970, as a group of high school football players breaks into the house of rich kid Lyle, who fumbled the big pass at the last game. They drunkenly wreck the house and are shocked by the appearance of Lyle's younger sister, Lurlene, who is eager to join the party. The collection's centerpiece is "Until Gwen," which has also been adapted by Lehane into a two-act play, Coronado. Transcribed, the play revolves around the edgy reunion of a hustler father and his son, Bobby, newly released after four years in prison. It quickly becomes apparent that Bobby's father has retrieved him only to find out where the heist loot is hidden, and Bobby, in turn, needs to know what happened to his girlfriend, Gwen. Powerfully envisioned lives, recounted unflinchingly.

Entertainment Weekly:

Lehane has a startling capacity for assessing broken people--i.e., who can be restored to the fold of humanity and who should be put down like animals. These five stories are filled with hard cases, and the answer to whether someone can be salvaged is all in the eyes. In "Running Out of Dog," he describes the disturbed friend of a Vietnam vet: "that look in his eyes--that boiled look." The best tale, "Until Gwen," one of several interlocking stories in Lehane's play Coronado (also included here), follows the nightmarish errand of a father and son who are more like two feral dogs tied together. A redemption of sorts is available, but it's an ugly one. B+

USA Today:

Dennis Lehane's new short-story collection, Coronado, is an apt reminder that the master of crime and literary fiction (Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone) is also a proficient short-story writer.

Only one story in Coronado —Mushrooms— has never been published before. But all the stories, written between 1999 and 2005, are character-driven and pick at the origins of violent behavior.

In Running out of Dog, set in tiny Eden, S.C., love and all its unrequited frustrations are wrapped in a melancholy story about Blue, a small-town loser who loses his grip on his meager slice of happiness. He runs out of stray dogs to shoot, and Jewel Lut, the woman he loves from afar, decides to stay with her abusive husband. Hope is a dangerous thing for someone like Blue, and murder is the true test of friendship, as Blue's friend Elgin makes a decision that puts his own future in the cross hairs.

In ICU, an innocent man hides from his unidentified pursuers in the local intensive-care units. His life, which seemed to have no meaning before, takes on the patina of nurturing solace as he consoles relatives of gravely ill patients and is comforted in return.

Gone Down to Corpus is a superbly crafted tale of how the hopelessness of a disaffected youth spurs a teenager to go on a destructive rampage in a local home. His aggression is stoked by a desperate search for that "blaze of light" that his father couldn't find, either. "I think about what my daddy said about how he would have died earlier had he known what the world was going to bring."

Mushrooms, about a revenge killing, displays how violence and abuse rob its victims of youth, hope and optimism.

Lehane saves the best for last with Until Gwen, a story about Bobby, a young man who has survived prison and a shootout but who drowned in his own personal hell years before. It is in this story that Lehane constructs one of the most diabolical fathers ever put on paper.

Until Gwen is followed by Coronado, a two-act play that builds on Bobby's story and cycles through the events that hard-wired his family's sorry state.

Short-story collections can be a tough sell for readers, but think of them as the perfect medium for our short attention spans. And who better to entertain the newcomer to the genre than an author whose stories make us dig deep down into our own hopes and fears.

Miami Herald:

Hardcore fans may object to the fact that the latest work from suspense master Dennis Lehane involves short stories instead of serial killers. But a wide streak of Lehane's vivid and melancholy darkness winds through this mean, gripping collection, buffeting its bleak landscapes and shaping its desperate characters.

Lehane is the author of a mind-boggling array of excellent crime fiction: the wrenching Mystic River, turned into a terrific film by Clint Eastwood; the creepy, heart-stopping Shutter Island, set at a hospital for the criminally insane; Shamus Award winner A Drink Before the War, which introduced private investigator Patrick Kenzie of South Boston; Darkness, Take My Hand, the second book in the Kenzie series and one of the scariest thrillers ever written.

Crime, violence and death also form the backbone of Coronado, which includes four previously published stories, a play based on one of them and a new work, Mushrooms, a drug-dusted revenge tale that acts as an unsettling snapshot of amorality.

Linking the stories are young men foundering in the face of an empty future. In the disturbing Running Out of Dog, two Vietnam vets return to their small South Carolina town and cope with restless estrangement in different ways. Elgin has an affair. Blue, at the mayor's request, takes up shooting the city's troublesome stray dogs, which have become a liability to tourists driving down the interstate. "Lot of money being poured into Eden these days, the governor said, lot of steps being taken to change her image, and he for one would be goddamned if a bunch of misbehaving canines was going to mess all that up.''

But Elgin, noting his friend's increasing weirdness, fears that his next target will be something else.

ICU is built around a flimsy, less arresting premise: A man hides from pursuers in a hospital, rotating through waiting rooms, watching the dramas that unfold and basking in the care of strangers. ''There is a basic human concern in hospitals, a unity. And he begins to suspect he is addicted to it.'' Gone Down to Corpus returns to gritty territory: A high school football player, just graduated with a dead-end future looming, intends to destroy a teammate's house but falls for his wild sister instead.

The centerpiece is the riveting Until Gwen, which opens with an unforgettable image: "Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon with an 8 ball in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the backseat.''

The story is a simple, stark portrait of evil, so enticing that Lehane couldn't let go. Its characters, he writes, ''kept walking around in my head, telling me that we weren't done yet.'' So he rewrote the piece as the play Coronado and cast his actor brother as the narrator's murderous dad. The transformation from prose to script is interesting, but it's the story that lingers, reminding you of the grim elegance of Lehane's imagination.

Washington Post:

The raw, surprising tales of passion and violence in Dennis Lehane's new collection remind us anew why he is one of the most interesting young writers in America today. Lehane first gained wide attention in 2001 with the publication of "Mystic River," his powerful story of murder and revenge in a working-class Boston neighborhood. "Mystic River" drew heavily on Lehane's roots in Boston's Dorchester community, where he was born in 1965 to two Irish immigrants. Soon after he started school, the nuns told his mother how much the boy loved reading, and she began taking him to the public library. Thus, not for the first time, a writer was born.

In the early 1990s, Lehane was a graduate writing student in Florida. He and his classmates were mostly churning out literary short stories, but he had grown up enjoying the work of Boston's Robert B. Parker, and one day, for a lark, he started a detective novel. The lark became "A Drink Before the War" (1994), which introduced Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, sometime lovers and partners in a Boston private investigations firm. It was the first of five Kenzie-Gennaro thrillers, all distinguished by dazzling prose and horrific violence. The Kenzie-Gennaro books were increasingly successful -- Bill Clinton was a fan -- and taken on their own terms, they were brilliant, but their carnage was such that they were not likely to attract a big, mainstream audience. Readers who admired Lehane's obvious gifts wondered if he shouldn't raise his sights.

He was wondering that, too, and as the new century began he put his series aside to write a novel about a tragedy in a blue-collar Boston neighborhood. Leaving a successful series was a gamble, but it paid off. For anyone who cares about good writing, to move from the Kenzie-Gennaro books to "Mystic River" is like exiting a funhouse into a world so real that it hurts. It's one of the best American novels of this young century, its excellence underscored by Clint Eastwood's Academy Award-winning film version in 2003.

After the triumph of "Mystic River," Lehane wrote a clever, deceptive little thriller, "Shutter Island" (2003), which he has called a homage to Gothic novels and B-movies, and he's at work on a long novel that will, in part, concern the Boston police strike of 1919. While we await its arrival, we have this vivid new collection, "Coronado" -- the title, like "El Dorado" or "Shangri-La," refers to a paradise that the losers in these stories can dream of but never attain. The collection is uneven, but nothing Lehane writes is without interest. Three of the stories are enjoyable but minor, two are substantial, and the play is an angry, violent, sometimes shocking piece that I would walk several miles to see performed.

Although all seven of Lehane's novels are set in or near Boston, three of these stories focus on the lives of aimless people in small towns in Texas, West Virginia and South Carolina. The first major story, "Running Out of Dog," which opens the volume, is classic white-trash noir. In Eden, S.C., Vietnam vet Elgin Bern works construction and carries on a torrid affair with a car dealer's wife. He also tries to keep track of his crazy, violent friend Blue, who has long worshiped the car dealer's wife from afar: "Elgin never bothered telling Blue that some women didn't want decency. Some women didn't want a nice guy. Some women, and some men too, wanted to get in bed, turn out the lights, and feast on each other like animals until it hurt to move." Blue is consoled by a job shooting wild dogs that are tarnishing the town's progressive image. In the end, some people are put down as heartlessly as the dogs.

In "Gone Down to Corpus," three West Texas boys decide to beat up a rich classmate who dropped a pass that caused them to lose a football game and their meager chances of winning college scholarships. Instead, finding no one at home, they trash the boy's house, only to have his younger sister arrive and complicate matters. The story doesn't go anywhere, but it's a chilling evocation of empty lives in an empty landscape. In the other major story, "Until Gwen," first published in the Atlantic in 2004, a career criminal picks up his son when the son is released from prison. The father demands a missing diamond. The son thinks the father murdered the son's girlfriend while trying to find the diamond, and it becomes clear that one of the men is going to kill the other. It's a tough little tale that Lehane originally dashed off for a crime anthology, but he didn't leave it there.

As Lehane explains in an introduction, his brother Gerry is an actor, and he decided to expand the two-person, father-and-son short story into a more ambitious two-act play, "Coronado," which was produced off-Broadway last year with Gerry as the no-good father. In the play, the story of the father and son is combined with those of two pairs of lovers who are also bent on homicide. It's a raw, passionate, mysterious piece, enhanced by sophisticated stage techniques and bitter humor. If you've never read Lehane, you probably should start with "Mystic River," but if you're already a fan, you'll savor this new glimpse into one of the most unpredictable minds in current American fiction.

San Francisco Chronicle:

Damage is the theme of the five stories and short play in "Coronado," an assured, technically impressive and largely compelling collection from crime novelist Dennis Lehane. His first offering since the 2003 novel "Shutter Island," this brief book spans the gritty and the grotesque. What little romance rears its unexpected head is confined to "Coronado," a strange theatrical piece that expands on "Until Gwen," Lehane's ghastly fable of greed and family dysfunction.

Lehane's isn't a pretty world, but it sure is vivid. The guy writes like an angel crunched for time. There are no wasted words here. These stories (and the brave, experimental but unsatisfying title piece) are stylistically taut, unlike "Mystic River," the great, operatic 2002 novel that established Lehane's reputation. Lehane can deftly conjure characters, from Elgin, the warped shooter with a conscience in "Running Out of Dog," to Lurlene, the sad object of desire at the heart of "Gone Down to Corpus."

All the circuits in these short fictions are closed; these are by no means stories of hope. In "Running Out of Dog," the aftermath of Vietnam defines the social psychology of Eden, a South Carolina town where dogs run wild and men run wilder. The nexus of "ICU" is a hospital in which our unnamed hero secrets himself, making it a sanctuary where he can hide from enemies he can't identify, let alone understand.

In "Gone Down to Corpus," a McMansion with a core so deeply rotten freaks out our hero and Lurlene, the scrawny, sexy sister of Lyle, the nerd who blew a football game so bad our hero wants to kill him. In "Mushrooms," a wan, trapped girl trades her future for security with a drug goon who has an Escalade. Contemporary? For sure. There are references to Zoom LeBron, Toyota Sequoias and al Qaeda. The rhythm is modern and accelerated, even in "Running Out of Dog," where the setting -- but little else save the beauty parlor -- is pastoral-cum-gothic.

The stories are compact and dense, particularly "Running Out of Dog." Elgin Bern is a Vietnam veteran who, like many others in Eden, wants a simple, stressless life. But his damaged childhood friend, Blue, itches to hurt others -- animal, human, doesn't matter -- to make himself feel whole, so Blue hires on with Big Bobby Vargas, Eden's mayor.

Big Bobby wants Elgin and Blue and some other good ol' boys to sit in a tree and shoot dogs that wander onto the interstate, thereby threatening Eden's chances of becoming a tourist spot known for its theme park, Eden Falls. Lay sex and infidelity over that provocative plot and you've got a rich yarn.

Lehane's language can be heated. Here, Elgin reviews his affair with Jewel Lut, the wife of Perkin Lut -- and the woman Blue really wants:

"He couldn't entirely put his finger on what need she satisfied, only that he needed her in that lakefront cabin once a week, that it had something to do with walking out of the jungle alive, with the ticking of his own death he'd heard for a full year. Jewel was somehow reward for that, a fringe benefit. To be naked and spent with her atop him and seeing that look in her eyes that said she was ready to go again, ready to gobble him up like oxygen. He'd earned that by shooting at shapes in the night, pressed against those damp foxhole walls that never stayed shored up for long, only to come home to a woman who couldn't wait, who'd discarded him as easily as she would a once-favored doll she'd grown beyond, looked back upon with a wistful mix of nostalgia and disdain."

"Dog" is the richest and most conventional story. "ICU" is more symbolic if no less chilling; the dialogue between the paranoid Daniel and Michael, the ex-KGB officer who comforts him, is inspired. "Gone Down to Corpus" portrays teenage high jinks run amok, while "Mushrooms," the nastiest, most brutish and shortest tale, makes thug life scary and surreal. "Until Gwen," a tug of war between a hateful father and an aggrieved son, blends love and greed to creepy effect. "Coronado," the lurid, easily visualized play that builds on "Until Gwen," might watch better than it reads. I'm not sure whether it adds to the original; it seems tacked on, and I would have preferred another story.

Perhaps this collection is a stopgap between big novels; "Coronado" certainly affirms Lehane's versatility, even virtuosity.

Hartford Courant:

In these five stories and the play, characters leap off the page at you and there are few you won't soon get out of your mind.... The play is a wonderful adaptation, underscoring the strengths and weaknesses of fiction and drama.