April Warnings is a collection of linked short stories that can be read together as one. The narratives are connected by the strange Midwestern ritual of going into an underground tornado shelter, the disappearance of a young boy, and a growing mythology about aliens and cultists near the railroad tracks of the Callahan Ranch in Baxter County. This mysterious location recalls Juan Rulfo’s Comala, Laura Hendrie’s Stygo, Colorado, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and the New Mexico of Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Última.

 

Farms, highways, and churches become the epicenter for truths, fictions, and myths rooted in larger ideas from the so-called “American Heartland,” a place belonging to indigenous populations, immigration routes, and beliefs about worlds that exist beyond the prairie. The product of growing up in Nebraska and an obsession with literature from the Spanish-speaking worlds, April Warnings evinces the diversity of people, thoughts, and beliefs that make places like Baxter County impossible to forget.