cover image Train Stops: Contemporary Short Stories

Train Stops: Contemporary Short Stories

Larry Frank. Sunstone Press, $28.95 (182pp) ISBN 978-0-86534-273-6

About as subtle as a runaway train, the 21 stories of this debut--from an expert on New Mexican folk art--barrel through the author's vaunted home turf, an L.A. childhood and later life in the Southwest, toward a series of platitudinous climaxes. A few interesting scenes appear along the way and vanish just as quickly. In ""The Master,"" the best--and darkest--story, a young boy discovers his gift as a hunter and repeatedly disobeys his parents to search the woods for ever larger prey; yet this story ends with an unfortunately hokey payback. ""Black and White,"" the tale of a museum director who trades from the collection to improve it, is emotionally believable, but the premise that the acquisitions board is inexplicably liquidated for a year and then reconvened is absurd. In the title story, a woman on a train fleeing her frumpy husband finds him waiting at the end of the line and magically (comically) relieved of all his previous failings. Endings are abrupt, epiphanies facile, dialogue burdened with exposition and prose irredeemably clumsy, with a table ""resonating beauty"" and a character whose ""languor was due to fragile health."" (Oct.)