The Desert Trap is a collection of gritty, compassionate stories about surviving life on the edge. Witness the addiction, poverty, mental illness, and motel living under an unforgiving desert sun. These fictionalized accounts draw from real lives lived in the margins, where fentanyl, meth, and violence press in close, and holding a family together takes everything you’ve got.

Set in a place where monsoons offer brief mercy and creosote clings to everything, these stories reveal what it means to endure, to care, and to keep going when the world around you is built to break you. Welcome to life in the desert’s harshest corners, where survival isn’t a theme. It’s a way of life.