Works by
Vestal McIntyre
(Writer)

Fiction

• Lake Overturn: A Novel (April 21, 2009)
  Eula, Idaho, is a cluster of steeples, oak trees, and boxlike homes sandwiched between golden fields and a wide-open sky. It freezes in the winter and bakes in the summer, but the air is so dry that neither extreme gets under your skin. It has never seen a battle, or an earthquake, or a Democrat in City Hall.
  
  Still, life in Eula is anything but simple.
  
  Lina and Connie are single mothers, neighbors in Eula's trailer park. Lina, the daughter of migrant Mexican farm workers, is trying to cope with her angry teenage son Jesús, newly returned after living with wealthy white foster parents. Connie, long abandoned, struggles with her literal reading of Old Testament laws against remarriage, especially when a handsome missionary visits her congregation. The women's younger sons, Enrique and Gene, are misfits whose mutual love of science offers stability and respite from schoolyard cruelties.
  
  Determined to win the statewide science fair, Enrique and Gene devise an experiment involving "lake overturn," a real scientific phenomenon in which deadly gases collect and eventually erupt from a lake's depths. In their quest to discover if Eula could suffer from such an event, the boys come into contact with an odd assortment of locals, including the frail-hearted school principal with grand ambitions, a rich but lonely lawyer who finds love outside his marriage just as his wife is succumbing to cancer, and a woman tortured by a past of abuse and addiction who decides to turn things around by offering herself as a surrogate mother.
  
  With sweeping perspective and a Victorian wealth of character, Lake Overturn exposes small-town America in all its beauty and treachery, sunshine and secrets.

Short Stories

• You Are Not the One (2005) -- Winner 2005 Lambda Literary Gay Men's Debut Fiction Awards
  In this debut collection of eight compulsively readable stories, Vestal McIntyre combines honesty and compassion with hilarious dialogue-bringing together the comic milieu of David Sedaris with the spot-on perceptions of Adam Haslett's You Are Not a Stranger Here. With "ONJ.com," a young woman in advertising decides she wants a gay man in her life, almost as if she were shopping for a poodle. Unluckily, the gay man she finds, a good-looking and fast-talking freelancer, isn't as pleasant and "fun" as she had hoped. In the loopy "Dunford," a lonely, aging architect with a suppressed fascination for female escorts decides impulsively to take the opportunity of his wife's absence to set up a date. Sadly for Dunford, he realizes too late that his escort doesn't share his penchant for masturbation in car washes. Quieter notes are sounded in "Foray" about a bookish teenaged recluse discovering an unexpected emotional connection to his family after his mother asks him to read Moby Dick to his young, mentally retarded cousin. And "Nightwalking" centers on a woman sleepwalker whose mother's death frames the occasion for a rocky family reunion. You Are Not the One marks the auspicious arrival of an exciting new talent.

Other

• TIN HOUSE Magazine #22 (Vol. 6 No. 2, 2009) by Rob Spillman, ed.
  Works by Daniel Alarcon, Eliot Wilson, Emily Raboteau, Frances Hwang, Holiday Reinhorn, James Salter, Jillian Weise, Maggie Robbins, Nami Mun, Rob Dennis, Scott Snyder, and Vestal McIntyre

• Open City #11: Octo Ate Them All (2000) by Melissa Pritchard, Michael Taussig, Vestal McIntyre