In his powerful debut collection Twelfth Year and Other Stories, Randy Hendricks paints each of his characters with a few meticulous strokes. Characters in search of identity, in search of the right path, in search of answers, drive each story and the questions each poses. In "The Stove, " Joby Johnson must contend with the weight of his own pride and the questions it raises about who he is and who he wants to be. Sitting in a hospital waiting room, Caleb Vance must confront his own regrets as he looks back on his wife and their life together in the story "D & C." The narrator of "Ruins" moves us through his search for the real man behind his grandfather and the real man behind himself, seeking in his memories what he could not find in the actual experiences themselves. Randy Hendricks's economical storytelling gives each work an inevitable sense, as if the stories had always existed, each line of dialogue following the one before so naturally that one could not imagine the stories being any other way. Step by step then, each story in this collection constructs a journey of the most internal and fundamental kind, journeys that we all must make toward who we are.
