By Nancy Spiller
FROM: Compulsive Reader

If you land on an East Los Angeles bus bench chatting with a self-proclaimed Shaky Town mayor, Emiliano Gomez, let the coaches fly by as you listen to his tales, the destinations they offer are of far greater value. Shaky Town by Lou Mathews is a linked short story collection filled with the working-class concerns of L.A.’s barrio, circa 1980s. In our rapidly gentrifying world, it’s a group of saints and sinners not heard from in a long time, and certainly not in such a caring, unflinching fashion. It brought to mind Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, a 1970 novel of his native Stockton, a classic of the down-and-out in California genre. Mathews is a fourth-generation East Side Angeleno who was a car mechanic and a street racer. His author’s bio bravely, endearingly, claims to have written seven books but previously only published two, including L.A. Breakdown, about those fast and furious knuckleheads. This book, he has said, took 12 years to get published. You’ll thank him for not throwing away his wrench.

In Shaky Town, Mathews expertly shows us how things work and why they break down, taking apart and putting back together a range of small, yet fully felt lives. His overlapping worlds are mapped in prose that shimmers like hammered copper. He knows this territory well: you don’t doubt that when a certain bug shrinks the leaves of a eugenia hedge, more of a morose neighbor’s sad guitar music will bleed through.

Despite serious setbacks, Emiliano remains big hearted and tender. Once making a living carving beautiful breakaway furniture for movie studios, only to have it destroyed in fight scenes, he first loses his beloved son, then three fingers while drunkenly running a wood lathe. How he loses their replacements as a Beverly Hills garbage man is the stuff of prank legends and proof he retains his sense of humor.

In the Pushcart Prize winning and much anthologized story, “Crazy Life,” with its unforgettable opening line: “Chewy called me from the jail,” we listen as Dulcie, a tough barrio Chica, determinedly tries to save her boyfriend. In “Con Safos Rifa,” cops thwart a rival high school rumble, yet lives are still lost. Just before tragedy strikes, there is a glorious description of two brothers in their street finery doing a “bop” walk out of the police station. Read Rest of Review Here