The stories are richly detailed, each creating a miniature world. In “All Along the Hills,” a troop of boys on a camping trip bully one of their own. But the story, Palma said, came about indirectly: “I often feed on memories that just move me in a particular way; it’s not always very linear.” Here, he was inspired by the day his daughter was born—feeling very emotional, teary-eyed, yet not wanting to cry. “It’s kind of toxic masculinity, right? I remember wanting to somehow explore that feeling and trying to write about the day of her birth. But it kept taking me elsewhere, and that’s how the story emerged.”
In the stories, the main characters are often off to the side, observing everything, Palma said. “Many times, I’ve got a protagonist highlighting a particular moment in life that was dark, complex, messy—but perhaps from a vantage point where there’s a been change, a distance from the event. Why does the protagonist return to the wound? I’m playing with that, acknowledging that ugliness, putting a spotlight on it. It really reveals a lot about who we are as humans.”
His novel, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens, began as a short story with the same arc, the same events over three days. Its central figure is Hugo, a Bolivian immigrant to Miami who makes a modest living as a babalawo, an assistant to a spiritualist, Lourdes. She sees psychic potential in him, but he practices his trade pragmatically, without any belief in Santería. Hugo has just lost his wife to cancer and is riddled with debt, a dominant theme in the novel. His economic oppression in a capitalistic culture eventually connects to his boyhood exploitation as a child worker in Bolivia’s silver mines.
The action complicates when the lawyer who’s been dunning Hugo for years calls with an offer: if Hugo can eliminate the hauntings in the lawyer’s home, he’ll erase the entire debt. So the skeptical Hugo, for whom the mystical and magic don’t exist, finds himself deep in that very world, even into the depths of hell itself.
Palma is probing the boundaries of the sacred and profane, belief and logic, love and money. He’s playing with what he sees as our cultural moment, where “people are kind of stepping away from magic or from things that can’t be quantified—which I think is really damaging.” The novel, he said, is ultimately “a critique of the world that we’ve made—a world of transactions.”
