The lyrical nature of the stories in Patrick John Brayer's The Cold Coin Heart create a rhythm, like that of thump of the asphalt under your troubled lost wheels down a ditch of highway with Brayer as a brimstone DJ delivering an imagined history of Fontana, California. In his hands, Cold Coin Heart is a Terrence Malick yarn or maybe a Roberto Bolaño mystery that keeps knocking at the core of things and with every knock the core packs up and moves away across expanses that could be Oklahoma, or maybe San Bernardino. If you are familiar with Brayer's lyrics, you will relish the larger canvas that he explodes herein. Psalms of the working class, narratives and characters colliding with a world out of time.
This book is made up of magical realism origin stories on the eve of annihilation.