The Focus Puller
Marcos E. González
427 pages, Paperback
Published April 1, 2026
by Amazon Books
ISBN-13: 979-8253144039
Language English
Disclaimer: I have known Marcos González for over 50 years. Our paths crossed in junior high school on the actual streets of Laredo. So you will have to forgive me as I strained to find inspirations and remnants of the Laredo in which we were raised, the Laredo he left physically but doesn’t seem to have entirely escaped, proving once again that Laredo is not a place but a state mind.
His protagonist Río Zapata shudders through a horrific nightmare about a violent end to his dear pet dog, and we learn that we are going to take a journey to make heads or tails of the meaning of this nocturnal message. Dreams and nightmares are supposed to mean something.
I know the author as Mark, and I am well versed in his style of asking questions and positing answers that are meant to crash into a punch line that is as outrageous as a Marx Brothers movie yet begging to be acknowledged as wisdom and farce.
It takes Mark more than a few pages to tie in memories of Rio’s hometown, but there is methane to his madness as he fills the air with a cast of characters who are deeply embedded in over-the-top images drawn from a familiar mish mash of popular culture and the literature that we were taught along the way. There is a lot of discussion of cochinadas that are both titillating and bracing.
When you add some abrasive takes on religious dogma with street common sense, you are comfortable knowing that this is going to go somewhere that you recognize in your repressed humorous takes on the solemnity of a sordid education.
This is not a novel for the easily offended. It isn’t one for the politically correct. And though it portends to meander into the territory so well set out by Kurt Vonnegut, González bursts that bubble by introducing characters with that exact name in a moment of detective deflation. You realize that you have been set up by a portion of the narrative surrounding Sherlock Holmes. You’re supposed to be a detective until the clues are crazier than the deductions you can make.
I don’t want to ruin this for anyone, but I thought I was going to have an advantage in knowing the author when I got to the end. I thought I was going to feast on a long-hidden revelation. But I ended up at an unwritten lyric in an Alejandro Escobedo song. “I thought I had it all figured out. Ha Ha Ha Ha.” And during these crazy days, we all need an old-fashioned free association new age laugh.
