5 O'Clock Shadow

Handmade Stories "After fifty years of living in these pieces, I can better get a grip on my psychosis," says the author of 5 O'clock Shadow. Honed and smoothed to the bone, these tales bear the balm and bruises of a man's life, abstracted. Drunkalogues, short pieces from the mouths of recovering drunks that remember how it was. "The point is, drunkalogues are not merely deviational episodes to be logged as down time, but are valuable dramas that contain the blueprint of our lives." "I'm reticent to publish for fear I'll fall over a railing to the mezzanine and land in a dumpster of store-bought roses, thorns intact." Which is just another drunkalogue that didn't make the cut. It takes place in Las Vegas in a lot outside the Review-Journal: a story that begins with a Greyhound bus and ends with same. "Some things don't change," says Peterson, "like real life and the stories that seek comfort in it."