"Home Alone could have never been set in Vegas,” I told my husband recently. I’d been thinking how a city like this one, with its many baked-in stereotypes, would be tough to casually write in as a setting. “You can’t just set a story in a nondescript neighborhood in Summerlin without Vegas playing a major role in the plot,” I argued.
When I mention this to Krista Diamond, author of the forthcoming Close Relationships with Strangers, one of four Southern Nevada-area authors with new books on the way, she agrees. But for her, that’s part of the appeal. “I actually moved to Las Vegas ... because it’s a fascinating and challenging place to write about,” she explains. “So much media that I’ve seen about Las Vegas goes one way or another. It’s either totally set on the Strip and it’s like nothing else exists, or it’s set in the suburbs. I wanted to write something that shows both realities.”
Novelist Maile Chapman says Las Vegas automatically “adds a layer of mystique” to any story. Chapman, who has lived in Las Vegas for 20 years and teaches English in UNLV’s creative writing MFA program, wanted her portrayal of Las Vegas to feel real. The protagonist in her psychological horror novel The Spoil lives in a townhouse and works for a real estate company. “There’s so much written by people who don’t love Las Vegas,” she says. She adds that it’s evident because the writing often lacks a “lived-in feeling.”
Author Claire Vaye Watkins says finding original ways to describe life in the desert is part of the writer’s job, though spending your formative years in Nevada can help. (She lives in Tecopa, California, but has also spent time in Pahrump.) People from a vice capital like Las Vegas have a sense of humor and “a certain wryness,” she says. “It’s a culture that values the loose and authentic.”
Watkins, who sets her latest book, Yellow Pine, in the South Pahrump Valley, regularly walks in the Mojave Desert, which is both ancient and very much alive with plants and animals people may not notice. “The ground at Yellow Pine was walked on by the giant ground sloths. … That’s a very different place than what you see in writing of it being a ‘dead’ place.”
Longtime Las Vegas resident Amanda Skenandore spent years juggling her career as a writer of historical fiction and her job as a nurse. Now a full-time author, she credits the Southern Nevada writing community for helping shape her career. “Some people joke that there’s no literary culture or community here,” she says. “That’s entirely false.”
While none of her novels have been set in Las Vegas — her latest, When No One Else Will, takes place in Chicago in the 1940s — she says she’s waiting for the right Nevada story to tell. “I would love to set a book in Las Vegas,” she says. “I’m really interested in the nuclear testing that they did in the 1950s. I’m interested in Hoover Dam.”
Maybe Home Alone couldn’t be set in Las Vegas, but perhaps that isn’t a bad thing. As Diamond points out, whether or not you frequent the Strip, the tourism industry influences the lives of everyone who resides here. To ignore this would be to depict a version of life in Nevada that’s as inauthentic as anything on TV. In Close Relationships with Strangers, the protagonist lives in Spring Valley and works in a restaurant based on the Peppermill. But she added elements unique to living in a resort town, like going to a casino to watch a movie.
“For people who live here,” Diamond says, “often our experience includes a little bit of the cliché and a little bit of the real stuff.”
LOCAL AUTHORS, WIDE-RANGING BOOKS
OUT NOW
Mandy, a real estate professional in suburban Las Vegas, cares for her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother while contending with her own mental health issues, grief — and something supernatural.
The Spoil
By Maile Chapman
552 pages, $20
Greywolf Press
Defying her religious upbringing, a nurse in 1940s Chicago works for an illegal women’s clinic, becoming deeply invested in the lives of patients.
When No One Else Will
By Amanda Skenandore
368 pages, $18.95
Kensington Books
JUNE 23
Ben, one of the few remaining paparazzi, pursues a dream shot of a scandalized star through the streets of Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
Close Relationships with Strangers
By Krista Diamond
320 pages, $29
Simon & Schuster
JULY 21
Faced with rapacious capitalism in the form of an invasive solar development near Pahrump (based on a real installation), Rose must shuck her desert isolation and risk
a fuller life.
Yellow Pine
By Claire Vaye Watkins
256 pages, $29
Riverhead Books
