Freshwater Boys

Michigan native Schuitema explores the lakeside life of his home state with deep enthusiasm in this debut collection, candidly recounting the passage through childhood, youth, and adulthood. A variety of fears are laid out as his characters come into contact with several incarnations of the inscrutable, from the hermit of “New Era, Michigan,” who lives in a school bus in the woods, to the struggle in “The Lake Effect” of a man’s attempt to balance fatherhood, marriage, and work during a nasty blizzard. Intense attention to geographical detail is chief among Schuitema’s concerns, sometimes to the detriment of narrative structure; most of the stories end with an all too neat flourish. Still, the stories contain numerous moments of memorable, tension-filled sensual descriptions, as in the harrowing search for a missing boy in “Camouflage Fall,” where the “glacial residue glowing under a cool glacial moon” coupled with the notion that a “flashlight seemed like a thin dagger compared to the huge chunks of darkness” stand as one of the book’s many moments of crisp, effective prose. (Apr.)