cover image In the Gloaming: Stories

In the Gloaming: Stories

Alice Elliott Dark. Simon & Schuster, $23 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-684-86521-8

The title story of Dark's second collection was a major 1994 hit, published in Best American Short Stories of the Century and made into a critically acclaimed HBO film starring Glenn Close, directed by Christopher Reeve. The other nine stories collected here prove that Dark is by no means a one-hit-wonder. Probing the murkiest and the more illuminated regions of the human psyche, these tales reckon with relationships between lovers, spouses, sisters, neighbors and parents and children with a masterful combination of subtle humor, emotional precision and devastating narrative tension. The collection opens with the celebrated title story about a woman tending to her adult son who's dying of AIDS; the tone throughout is one of sorrowful, unnerving quiet until the final, cathartic line. ""The Tower"" is a spirited tale of a suave, detached bachelor who, upon finally meeting his soul mate, falls madly in love, setting up a chain of coincidences that leads the new couple to a hilarious, unexpected plateau. Similarly twisted humor abounds in ""The Secret Spot,"" which suspensefully skewers a vengeful woman who obsessively plans a long-awaited confrontation with her husband's mistress. Other stories perceptively plumb the relationships between sisters, with ""The Jungle Lodge"" following two teen sisters on a jaunt in Peru that turns nightmarish, and ""Maniacs"" showing the despair and longing in a mother taking her two pubescent daughters to the airport so they can fly alone to visit their divorced father. The author manifests the voices of men and women, teens and seniors, with equal dexterity, and whether it's an elderly woman facing the frightening immediacy of relocating to a rest home, a man trying to choose between his wife and his lover, or a dying celebrity desperate for a favor from the home-town neighbors she's always scorned, Dark's characters ring fearlessly, plangently true. Dark (Naked to the Waist) belongs in the annals with literary peers Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro, and with this collection she should garner widespread acclaim and attention. Agent, Henry Dunow. (Jan.)