Light in the Crossing: Stories

This is a great book of stories. I like to read before bedtime in the evenings, and usually I take several evenings to finish a single story. However, with this book, I found myself wanting to read more than one story in an evening. I use a benchmark to decide whether or not a story is good. If I keep thinking about it for hours (or days) afterwards, that means it was a good read. The stories in this book produced images that stand out so vividly that, in memory, it is as if I saw them in a movie or even in real life ... the boy charred by lightning, dangling from the windrower as it goes round and round ... the deer carcasses hanging from trees in the night. No other author has produced lingering images in my mind that are any more vivid than those generated by these stories. The only other author who did as good a job of that (for me) was Isaac Bashevis Singer. I've had the opportunity to meet Kent Meyers in person. He gave a talk for Northern Hills Writers, our little group here in Lead, South Dakota. It's amazing how much effort he puts into his work, and it has paid off in this collection of stories. Reading Kent's work is not, however, a lazy affair. Your mind's eye must be open.

This is my 3rd Kent Meyers book and I can't recommend them highly enough. What a writer! His works are as emotionally jarring as those by Chuck Palahniuk without all the violence and the craziness. This is a book of short stories and each one packs a wallop. One of my favorites was "Abiding by Law" which speaks to the universality of human emotions, our fear of the unknown and love for the safe and familiar, the strong drive to protect those in our family. This story has a wonderful aha moment, when a man's protective shell is cracked by a smile and a bow, a gentle nudge from one of those amazing people who are able to form bridges between people, and he is able to reach out a helping hand to his neighbor. In "Making the News" a farmer creates sculptures out of cars. "We were in the grove. Mammouths Resurrected come into view. Ed'd turned three cars into mammoths, put thick legs and trunks on them, and tusks,and he'd half-buried one so it looked like it was climbing out of the earth, and the second one was leaping like it'd just shook free, and the third was in full run, its trunk raised. From a distance they really did look like mammoths. The rock pile of all the rocks Ed's father and Ed and Gray had picked out of the fields was in the center of the group, and second mammoth looked like she was leaping over it, her front legs curled up for the leap. 'I don't see how he does it,' Paul Alcorn said. 'Everywhere you turn, there's something new.' We stood looking at the sculpture, the wind making light scatter through the trees. 'It's like he's trying to bring it all back,' Paul Alcorn said. 'That's what it feels like. Everything that ever happened here. Everything that's lost, he's trying to retrieve it.'"

A fine and very satisfying collection of stories with a strong sense of place (southern Minnesota) and the people who inhabit it. Meyers' stories represent the narrative tradition found in "Winesburg, Ohio" and "The Spoon River Anthology." He has a gift for capturing the way rural Midwesterners speak, and each of the stories is a dramatic monologue in a distinctly different voice. He also has a remarkable ability to evoke in words the experience of physical sensations -- qualities of air and movement, nuances of deeply felt emotion and memory. There are frequent references to the topography of the land and the traces left behind of geological ages past. This awareness of prehistory and the cycles of seasons, migratory birds, and extremes of weather, frame the lives of characters who live and work in rural communities and on family farms. A young man is struck by lightning while operating a combine. A crew boss at a corn processing plant must deflect the mounting rage of an itinerant employee. A young woman struggles with her father to hang onto a farm he no longer wants. A young farmer restores a section of his cornfields to wetlands, so geese will stop again on their seasonal flights. Two bored teenagers invent a death-defying game played out nightly on country roads.Although often haunted by isolation, loss, and regret, these are richly experienced lives, lived by people reminded daily of their vulnerability by the vast, open land around them and their dependence on one another.