cover image Hammertown Tales

Hammertown Tales

Hilary Masters. S. Wright, $15 (128pp) ISBN 978-0-913773-18-5

The better stories in this jarringly uneven collection of 15such as ""Foundation'' and ``Success''are touching and subtle, executed with a delicate sense of detail and overtone as they approach at oblique angles the gray areas of ambiguous relationships. Others``The Moving Finger,'' for example, in which a man passing through Chicago's O'Hare makes the mistake of phoning an old flameare fragmentary, anecdotal, brittle. The pieces set in the fictive Hammertown, a rural small town in upstate New York, often lapse into a mannered rustic folksiness. In his best passages, Masters shows an authentic, deep-running feeling for the countryside (a compound of awe, nostalgia and regret) and the lyrical and descriptive powers to render it, that help greatly to redeem the weaker pages. wsFebruary 1