From Publishers Weekly
Traces of Faulkner's A Rose for Emily and faint echoes of the horror film classic Psycho infuse this highly charged, eccentrically imaginative narrative by the author of Branches. The unusual tale comprises mainly dialogues between 11-year-old Jeliza-Rose and her four bodiless Barbie doll heads as she wanders about the isolated landscape of a house beside the railroad tracks in bleak rural Texas, interrupted periodically by the dynamite exploding in a nearby limestone quarry. Jeliza-Rose's mother is dead from a heroin overdose. The girl's father, 67-year-old Noah, a drug-addicted, has-been rock guitarist, leaves his wife's corpse on the bed in their sleazy L.A. apartment and takes his abused, disturbed daughter on a Greyhound bus to his long-dead mother's home. There Noah pins a map of Denmark on the wall and sits and stares trancelike for days on end. Jeliza-Rose soon encounters Dell, an eccentric neighbor woman who wears a beekeeper's veil and has a brain-damaged brother named Dickens. Precocious (and often pretentious) conversations between Jeliza-Rose and her Barbie heads (one is named Classique) serve to illumine the girl's disturbed state of mind and to further the surreal plot. As Jeliza-Rose's fantasy world collides with Dell's appalling secret, a grotesque history is revealed. This brutal portrait of a young girl's unbearable childhood requires immersion in her fevered imagination, and is relieved only at the end by Jeliza-Rose's brave effort to save herself from total breakdown. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Jim Lewis
The prose is a stage set for Cullin's ventriloquism, which is brilliant and beautiful.


From Kirkus Reviews
Cullin returns to the rural Texas landscape of his Whompyjawed (1999) and Branches (p. 5), in a narrative that veers unevenly between mordant humor and a self-conscious quirkiness that too often undercuts his real gift for language and invention.The precocious and preternaturally observant adolescent narrator, Jeliza-Rose, is a classic American literary type reminiscent of Harper Lee's Scout and Carson McCullers's Frankie. After her mother dies of a drug overdose, Jeliza-Rose and her father move from Los Angeles to Texas, returning to What Rocks, the farm that belonged to her late grandmother. Her father, Noah-also a former junkie-is a gifted guitarist and songwriter who dreams of moving to Denmark. Why Denmark? Like much else here, the reason seems rooted less in a coherent narrative structure than in authorial whimsy. Nothing particularly pressing keeps father and daughter living at What Rocks, other than a lack of money and of will to go anywhere else. Jeliza-Rose is left to fend for herself, and, like children everywhere, she has a prodigious imagination that keeps her continually diverted while her neglectful father lapses into a terminal dreaminess. She befriends a lonely scarecrow of a man called Dickens, an eccentric woman, Dell, who likes to wander around wearing a beekeeper's protective mask, and a stuttering boy named Patrick. Jeliza-Rose also calls on a large collection of Barbie dolls for amusement. Cullin has a wonderful feel for the big and wide Texas landscape that Jeliza-Rose finds herself in. His descriptions of how a child can happily lose herself in the long grass, wildflowers, and mesquite are lyrical without being precious.There's not much of a story for Cullin to hang his sharply drawn, often poignant evocation of childhood on. Still, his feel for the painful awkwardness and sensitivity of adolescence is worth the trip. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


The New Mexican, Lynn Cline
Like William Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Cullin's literary setting is peopled with unforgettable, quirky and eccentric characters.


The Albuquerque Journal, Eddie D. Chuculate
(Tideland) succeeds by its own standards.... a pleasure to read.


Rain Taxi, Peter Ritter
Cullin’s latest is a full-fledged American Gothic horror show.... recalls the meditative ambivalence of Seamus Heaney’s The Tollund Man.


The Austin Chronicle, Clay Smith
Surprisingly thrilling reading.


Book Description
Welcome to the world of Jeliza-Rose, the young female narrator of Mitch Cullin’s provocative new novel, Tideland. And what exactly has brought Jeliza-Rose from Los Angeles to rural Texas? And why won’t her father talk to her anymore, preferring instead to gaze at the wall? And who is making all that racket in the attic? In a story which is at times suspenseful, darkly surreal, and often humorous, Jeliza-Rose drifts from the harsh reality of her childhood, escaping into the fantasies of her own active imagination where fireflies have names, bog men awaken at dusk, monster sharks swim down railroad tracks, and disembodied Barbie heads share in her adventures. In the tradition of such cult classics as Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory, Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, and William Goyen’s The House of Breath, Mitch Cullin’s novel introduces us to an extraordinary world as created by an extraordinary narrator—Jeliza-Rose. Like his previous novels (Whompyjawed, Branches), Cullin offers up a unique voice, one that moves through a landscape populated with singular characters and stark imagery: a remote farmhouse in Texas owned by Noah, an aging rockabilly guitarist; the mysterious Dell, who wanders her property in a beekeeper’s hood; Dickens, the childlike man with an affinity for maps of the ocean floor, his wigwam, and sticks of dynamite. Set amongst grassy fields, alongside an abandoned quarry, in dim bedrooms and mesquite-shaded trails, Tideland illuminates those moments when the fantastic emerges from seemingly common occurrences and lives–and a lonely child discovers magic and danger behind even the most mundane of events.


About the Author
Mitch Cullin is the author of the acclaimed novels Whompyjawed and Branches. He has received a Dodge Jones Foundation grant, writing sponsorship from Recursos De Santa Fe, the Stony Brook Short Fiction Prize, and a nomination for inclusion in the ALA’s "Notable Book List, 1999." His fiction has appeared in The Santa Fe Literary Review, Christopher Street, The Bayou Review, Austin Flux, Harrington’s Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, and other publications. He currently resides in Tucson, Arizona.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Traces of Faulkner's A Rose for Emily and faint echoes of the horror film classic Psycho infuse this highly charged, eccentrically imaginative narrative by the author of Branches. The unusual tale comprises mainly dialogues between 11-year-old Jeliza-Rose and her four bodiless Barbie doll heads as she wanders about the isolated landscape of a house beside the railroad tracks in bleak rural Texas, interrupted periodically by the dynamite exploding in a nearby limestone quarry. Jeliza-Rose's mother is dead from a heroin overdose. The girl's father, 67-year-old Noah, a drug-addicted, has-been rock guitarist, leaves his wife's corpse on the bed in their sleazy L.A. apartment and takes his abused, disturbed daughter on a Greyhound bus to his long-dead mother's home. There Noah pins a map of Denmark on the wall and sits and stares trancelike for days on end. Jeliza-Rose soon encounters Dell, an eccentric neighbor woman who wears a beekeeper's veil and has a brain-damaged brother named Dickens. Precocious (and often pretentious) conversations between Jeliza-Rose and her Barbie heads (one is named Classique) serve to illumine the girl's disturbed state of mind and to further the surreal plot. As Jeliza-Rose's fantasy world collides with Dell's appalling secret, a grotesque history is revealed. This brutal portrait of a young girl's unbearable childhood requires immersion in her fevered imagination, and is relieved only at the end by Jeliza-Rose's brave effort to save herself from total breakdown.

Kirkus Reviews

Cullin has a wonderful feel for the big and wide Texas landscape that Jeliza-Rose finds herself in. His descriptions of how a child can happily lose herself in the long grass, wildflowers, and mesquite are lyrical without being precious.