Something was very the matter in El Paso. The lines between reality and the supernatural were merging and the elasticity of time was making the present and the past equally accessible. For some members of the family, this presented the opportunity to escape reality. For others, this was reality.

The opening line in Luis Jaramillo’s debut novel, “The Witches of El Paso,” is, “It’s your fault.” But is it? Both the premise of the book and its first sentence urge us to read on. Ultimately, we realize we are page-turning to understand the nature of a dark family mystery, the weight of a promise and the hope of a child.

Jaramillo was born and raised in Salinas except for that one year during first grade, which he and his family spent in El Paso to be closer to his ailing grandfather. In Salinas, he had no extended family. In El Paso, he discovered, everyone was somehow related to everyone. Or so it seemed. The contrast remained with him.

His father, an attorney, who had been working for California Rural Legal Assistance in Salinas, became the director of Legal Services, through which he sued the INS. At the end of the year in El Paso, the family returned to Salinas, where Jaramillo ultimately graduated from high school and went off to Stanford, as his mother and other relatives had, before him. He was in pursuit of a degree in political science and international relations when he turned his attention to writing and ultimately graduated with a degree in English.

Jaramillo went on to New York, where he achieved an masters of fine art from The New School, where he currently serves as an assistant professor of creative writing. His first literary success was “The Doctor’s Wife,” an award-winning collection of short stories inspired by his maternal grandmother.

“In writing these short stories,” he said, “I was thinking of my mother’s family and how humor was used to handle painful things. This enabled me to talk with my grandmother about the loss of her child, my mother’s brother, when he was very young.”

Anything, except that, might seem funny. At least in the reminiscing.

“My grandfather, a doctor, took my 12-year-old uncle on a fishing trip in the woods. When my grandfather sipped his beer,” Jaramillo said, “there was a bee inside, which stung his throat. Worried his throat might close up, he told my young uncle how to perform an emergency tracheotomy, just in case. Who does that to a child? It was hilarious in the retelling.”

This is an example of the stories that made the book, one of which is a single sentence long, and all of them entertaining in the telling.

In conceiving “The Witches of El Paso,” Jaramillo turned his attention to the other side of his family, where the stories and his interpretation of them were more compelling, curious, than funny. This narrative has moments of mirth, but the circumstances and how the family navigates them, in two realms, is sobering. In support of this, Jaramillo structures the story by a balancing of alternating timelines, which enriches the tale and its telling.

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to write a book about magic — or witches — a word that evokes such strong reactions in people,” Jaramillo said.

“In fact, the narrative really wasn’t working for me until my primary character ‘Nena’ appeared on the page. And El Paso gives people such a strong sense of place that putting them together did something, informed the story.”

Nena is a force of nature, a character who’s hard to deny. Because she’s in her 90s, when she speaks her truth, others have a tendency to assume she’s making things up. After burning a pot of rice, she becomes at risk for being shuttled off to an assisted living facility.

“Thinking of my grandmother who was extremely capable,” said Jaramillo, “I know where Nena comes from. I could feel the pain of losing one’s capabilities. We all want to have autonomy over our lives; that never goes away. This is a pivotal issue in the book.”

Inspirations of people and place

Although raised in Salinas, Jaramillo resides, with his husband, musician Matthew Brookshire, in New York, where he has lived for 25 years.

“I always knew I wanted to be in New York, where the publishing world is,” Jaramillo said. “It took me a long time to understand what it meant to write and publish a book, but I knew I wanted to; I just had to figure it out.”

The inspiration may have started when Jaramillo met author Beverly Cleary in a bookstore. He was 7.

“I was so starstruck that there she was, standing next to me, this woman who had already written so many books, and I couldn’t conceive of it. I didn’t have a lot of direct role models, and I so admired her.”

Although, he reasons, his mother, Ann Jaramillo, wrote a youth novel, “La Linea” or “The Border” (Square Fish 2008), a poignant story about crossing the border from Mexico into the United States.

His own novel, “The Witches of El Paso,” is, essentially, about the intersection of creativity and culture, the moments in our lives, he says, when we are driven to express who we are in the face of where we came from and where we are, and what that looks like.

Published Oct. 8, “The Witches of El Paso” is available at River House Books at The Crossroads Carmel, and via Amazon.