I don't really know how to rate this book.

When Restless Books offered me a review copy of The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories, I jumped at the opportunity; after all, Restless Books has never steered me wrong. So when I finished the first story, the titular "The Cowboy Bible," thoroughly confused, I turned to the book's Goodreads page for guidance and found my initial impression immediately validated by reviewer Brian Grover, who summed it up as "literally, nonsense."

Reluctant to dismiss a Restless title so cavalierly, however, I returned to the publisher description and found the key to unlocking Carlos Velázquez's project: the Cowboy Bible is more than the book it appears to be in the lead story but is, instead, "a mystical and protean object" manifested in a variety of forms, both animate and inanimate, in each subsequent story (and even, at times, taking multiple forms in a single story). Once I understood that The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories is the verbal equivalent of a Salvador Dalí painting, I found myself relishing all of the ways in which the stories melt into each other. The book isn't really The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories; it is the story of the Cowboy Bible.

It is Velázquez's description of his enterprise as "stories" which may explain some of the difficulties I experienced as a native English speaker/reader. As The Guardian recently explained, "[s]ome cultures do not distinguish between fiction and nonfiction - and instead talk of 'stories'"; one of the cultures identified in the article is Mexico. The Cowboy Bible's seven stories are divided into three sections - Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Neither Fiction Nor Non-Fiction - yet seemed equally surreal to me. Perhaps my "naive" anglophone tendency to distinguish between "'the writing of imagination and the writing of fact'" impeded my ability to see the deeper truth(s) Velázquez was trying to convey.

This is why I don't know how to assign a numerical rating to The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories. The stories cannot be assessed individually; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. How can I weigh the book's exuberance and phantasmagoric imagination against its obscure (to me, at least) pop culture references and its incomprehensibility to any reader who hasn't read the publisher's blurb? I can definitely state that The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories is not for every reader, but those who are willing to patiently immerse themselves in the world of PopSTock! will find it a strangely rewarding experience.

I received a free copy of The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories through Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.