Louis, T.A.

T.A. Louis

Aaron Louis Tordini (pen name T. A. Louis) is an American author born in Daytona Beach, Florida on June 21, 1971. He is the author of the Southern Gothic novella, Things That Hang from Trees, which takes place in St. Augustine, Florida where the author frequented as a child. He also wrote the screenplay for the 2005 film adaptation directed by Ido Mizrahy.

Things That Hang From Trees

Being exiled to Florida, the reader is engaged like the bones of a ghost to a place specific in space and time, like a play staged near the deepest roots of the oldest city in America. In Things That Hang From Trees, the author creates a tangible mythology, believably painful and touching. Behind a strip mall on a dead end street stands a Live Oak center stage; the heat of the sun is pumped into the theater. A barbershop, a diner, a lingerie shop, and the people who pass through the walls of the strip map define an outlandishly familiar microcosm. Louis manages suspense, instills empathy and lust, bringing a clench in the reader's throat with description and metaphor that unfold like an after-school special-ed nightmare. Like a greasy plate on which someone has used a finger to etch the proverb "wash me" in the grime, a bum, a bully, a special child and the eccentric business owners are the epitome of a dysfunctional family fighting to extract the good from the light. Out back, under the shadow of the ominous oak, the nucleus of detritus, Louis' characters illustrate the anomie of intolerance in a story of foreboding and hope, with an ending that succeeds in removing preconceptions and exemplifies the craft of fiction.

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Louis, T.A.