RaveFull StopWatkins has been likened to Annie Proulx, Denis Johnson, and Joan Didion — all appropriate comparisons — but Watkins’s expansive, wrenching prose signals a unique talent ... for the majority of the book, the ominous undertone is offset by prose so original and satisfying that it’s impossible not to delight in the perfect descriptions ... While most of the stories are immediately immersive, a few seem to merely echo the collection’s themes in thinner form ... Perhaps this is apparent because the rest of the works are so powerful and concrete. The emotional resonance of the tales — the sense of struggling to pull oneself up by another person — is mixed with images of crumpled photographs, flakes of gold dust, and blinking slot machines that linger long after the stories end.
