Author Description

Happy Birthday Jesus chronicles the creation of a monster: Jesus Olivas, a Mexican American boy raised by his grandmother in northern California. Survival of the fittest is the law in young Jesus' world, but his shyness and sensitivity become a dark mirror for the weaknesses and sinfulness of others. Transformed into the perfect victim by his grandmother, a religious fanatic, and the teachings of his parish priest, Jesus is progressively abused and brutalized. At eighteen, he marks his coming of age with the savage rape of a prostitute, the only person who ever loved or be-friended him, and with an attack that maims the parish priest he both hated and feared. As a result, Jesus graduates from the supposedly nurturing institutions of family, church and school into the labyrinth of horrors that is the correctional system. Happy Birthday Jesus is a masterpiece of understatement that combines a lyrical rendition of the most abject aspects of the human condition with keen irony. It is a revelatory and spellbinding probe into the anatomy of madness and despair.