Here in the World: Thirteen Stories

Lancelotta's debut collection of 13 spare, fragmented short stories about women, nine of which are written in the first person, coheres as a series of dramatic monologues in which the theme of suppressed sexuality is a dark motif. In tensile prose energized by raw sexual imagery juxtaposed against realistic details of landscape and atmosphere, Lancelotta focuses on women with arrested emotional development. Most of the stories are informed by experiences from her Catholic upbringing. ""The Guide"" is a tale of shame and sexual repression learned in parochial school. ""Quiet"" deals with an adolescent girl's furtive and humiliating experiences with the boys in her crowd. The narrator of ""In Bars"" is a deeply lonely woman who spends nights drinking and flirting to escape from solitude and from the sounds of her next door neighbors' domestic contentment. The narrator acknowledges that in bars she has an illusion of the possibility that ""we will inhabit the world with a new destiny, that someone will look at us and make us something new."" ""What Is Close,"" one of the few third-person narratives, concerns a young woman who travels constantly, with no sense of home or belonging: ""What drives her forward is the space between, the not-there, the neither."" Though their urgent tone is compelling, the voices in these stories tend to sound the same, varying little in tone, tenor and attitude. Though Lancelotta writes convincingly about sexual need, the unvarying plight of her protagonists, caught in the limbo between religious indoctrination and frustrated desire, eventually strikes only a single note. (Nov.)