Tender as Hellfire

Paperback reissue of the debut novel by the author of the best sellers The Boy Detective Fails, How the Hula Girl Sings and Hairstyles of the Damned (more than 70,000 copies sold).
“Extremely vivid . . . Any number of novels have been written about unhappy childhoods and bizarre families, but this one surpasses many.” ―Kirkus Reviews
Long before he established himself as an indie-publishing sensation with his hit novels Office Girl, How the Hula Girl Sings, Hairstyles of the Damned and The Boy Detective Fails, Joe Meno brought out his debut novel, Tender As Hellfire, with St. Martin’s Press. Here, with a re-edited paperback edition, Meno limns a near-fantastical world of trailer park floozies, broken-down ’76 Impalas, lost glass eyes, and the daily experiences of two boys trying to make sense of their random, sharp lives.
Dough and Pill are brothers bound by more than blood. The anguish of their past, the terror of their present, and the uncertainty of their future all underscore the only truth that is within their grasp: each other. For beneath the cruel surface of their trailer park community lies a menagerie of odd characters, each one strange yet somehow beautiful. Surrounded by the strange and displaced, Dough and Pill must navigate through a world of constant pain and confusion.
Finding beauty in unexpected places and maintaining a reverence for hard-won scars, these two brothers learn, finally, that even broken things can be perfect.