A Working Man’s Apocrypha: Short Stories

Natural disasters, difficult adolescences and morality tales make up Luvaas’s first collection of stories (after two novels). The diabetic groundskeeper of the title story composes a combination love letter / last will and testament for his widowed boss, confessing all his unexpressed longing and regret. His letter, rife with phonetic misspellings, pushes the story close to the edge of labored sentimentality. “Silver Thaw” suffers from the same feeling and follows curmudgeonly sisters Vi and Winnie as they, in their adjacent apartments, cope separately with a winter power outage. “Trespass” closes its story of a man having trouble keeping a drifter off his property by admonishing the reader to “Invite The Trespasser in to sleep in your house, make sure he’s comfortable and has all he needs.” Luvaas’s disaster stories are less instructive; tornados, floods and car wrecks demonstrate the vulnerabilities of modern life. The best stories concern youth; “The Sexual Revolution” tracks a pair of twins coming of age in the era of Elvis and the Red Scare, while “Original Sin” follows a boy from the same period sent to stay with a nonconformist aunt. Nostalgic detail fills out and enlivens the stories of growing up, but the adults remain largely unconvincing. (Sept.)