Carolyn See
Storm Season is about family, the working class, the crimes human beings have committed against the land, and the hypnotic, redemptive quality of disaster—why human beings love being scared out of their socks. It's spooky, beautiful, bizarre.
—(Los Angeles Times)
Rosellen Brown
I don't think you have to live in dangerous territory to be pulled along through this novel's fascinating meteorological or psychological vortex. Mr. Hauptman's characters' anger, their refusal to knuckle under to the diminution of their dreams, rings absolutely true.
—(New York Times Book Review)
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Chasing tornadoes is Burl Drennan's passion. Burl is a young man who, after a brief escape, returns to his small hometown, Nortex, in the Texas panhandle. Directionless, he yearns vaguely to regain his lost freedom, a need that chasing tornadoes seems to fulfill. Burl himself is like the center of his beloved storms: around him events and other characters swirl, giving playwright Hauptman's ( Big River ) first novel its shape and strength. Burl's father, Willie, an alcoholic is dying of cancer; John Arcement, a Vietnam vet and railroad conductor, dreams of building a log cabin near a river; Bebe Sanchez, Burl's lover, sees more clearly than he that his absorption in tornadoes is stronger than his attachment to her. In Hauptman's balanced depiction, each of these characters, through death or through desperation, escapes Nortex and thus dissipates the activity around Burl, who, left to himself, finally perceives his own dream and acts upon it. Engaging, unpretentious characters and an idiosyncratic narrative make this an auspicious debut. (Jan.)
Library Journal
Texans often write about the state's landscape and weather, finding in them a metaphor for the bleakness of individual lives. In his first novel, playwright and story writer Hauptman's main character, Burl, terrified by images of local and global destruction, becomes obsessed by tornadoes. He forms a rock band called Uncontrolled Meltdown and then goes away to college. When the band dissolves, Burl returns home to a dead-end job on the railroad. He later takes in the former lover of a menacing biker and her two children and prepares to return to college to study meteorology. A train derailment, the biker's kidnapping of one of the children, and the death of Burl's father temporarily ``derail'' his plans, but in the end he fulfills his dream: to experience the terrifying beauty of the inside of a tornado. Hauptman loads the book with interesting scenes of tornadoes, but fellow Texans Larry McMurtry, Rolando Hinojosa, and Lionel Garcia have written more evocative works on Texan disillusion. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/91.-- Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib., New York
Kirkus Reviews
A first novel, Texas-set, about a young man who comes of age by way of his obsession with tornadoes, the cancerous death of his father, and a love affair with a Native American. What could be melodramatic in other hands, short-story writer and dramatist Hauptman (Big River, etc.) spins out into a fine heartland novel, evocative and moving. Burl Drennan returns to his hometown of Nortex (which is "like a black hole" where "the force of gravity" is too strong to resist) and lives in the Sands Motel after his rock band, a would-be ticket to the big time, dissolves. He gets a job working for the railroad and also experiences a twister of such force that it flattens the town: "Nortex had finally made the national news." The force of the twister becomes a touchstone for Burl (and for the entire town), and he becomes addicted to twisters, even drives the range looking for them. Meanwhile, his father discovers that he has terminal cancer, though he fights it for a good long time before it takes him near the end of the novel, when one character, empathizing with Burl, says that "It seems like everybody's getting it. They say it's something in the water." Before the close, though, in which Burl faces his fate and goes off to school to study meteorology, he becomes an amateur expert on storms (in part by finding a sort of guru, full of near-mystical information on funnels) and has an affair with Bebe Sanchez. Hauptman tells Burl's story against a backdrop of the town rebuilding itself, deftly incorporates religion, and otherwise makes nary a wrong move while meditating on fate and love before ending the narrative with a railroad wreck and its aftermath. This one is a find, conveying mysteryand hard-edged wonder while evoking a Texas that will be difficult for readers to forget.
