In House of Blue Lights

Susan Neville has long been a chronicler of secret lives, shadow selves, possibilities and fears and yearnings. She is one of the most lyrical prose stylists I know, and her characters are often illuminated by the light from lives they almost lived, choices they nearly took. IN THE HOUSE OF BLUE LIGHTS, Neville's newest collection, presents stories that are dazzlingly alive with what-might-have-been, possibilities so alive they feel like what-still-might-be. One of Neville's great gifts is her ability to present characters in the grip of double lives: visible, outward caily existences, alongside darker, hidden lives of desire. Characters are shaped and distorted by their longings--for stability, for a discernible God, for a glimpse of color in the middle of a tedious, gray midwestern winter--and IN THE HOUSE OF BLUE LIGHTS achieves a strange and beautiful expansiveness because characters generally do receive what they long for. In the luminous "Blue," the old husband of a young woman goes to lunatic lengths to bing color into her drab days--to bring her pleasure, that simple thing. In "Your Own Most Quiet Voice" a girl watches her mother slip into insanity. The girl years for the return of her normal life, and normality ultimately reasserts itself, but with a new, ghastly face. And in "August" a young wife, terrified by the bonds of marriage, is offered a chance to flee from those bonds, only to glimpse the more terrifying constriction beyond them. Like descriptions of God, the lives Susan Neville describes are gorgeous and terrifying, and this book is subtle, moving, and brilliant. --Erin McGraw, Cincinnati