"Troubled relationships among everyday people take center stage in this heart-wrenching short-story collection set in the Midwest." —Chicago Tribune"Neville, consistently subtle, draws us through these stories of ordinary people about to be defeated by memory, by unarticulated need, by the oppressive slate of the Midwestern winter sky, with her delicate, almost fragile, voice, her hypnotic rhythms . . . . In the House of Blue Lights is a searching, beautiful anatomy of our quietest desires." —The Hollins Critic"In Neville's stories, the soul is a house of blue lights, the earth is a house of blue lights, and responsibility, pleasure, and tragedy all come from the moments when men and women make peace with their restlessness, with history, or with the randomness of God's design. The stories themselves are always graceful and startling; they make the familiar American world seem like it is still full of surprising things, and still worth caring about." —Andrew Levy"The voices that tell these beautifully observed and humane stories come from, or pass through, the inner lives of the people who inhabit them; thus, the first substance of the worlds in which they occur are their rich and varied presence." —Chuck Wachtel"There's a sad, still center to practically everything in the world, and Susan Neville knows it and is unafraid to write straight out of it. This is a brilliant and haunted book." —Marianne Boruch"Surrounding Susan Neville's fictional universe there is always an ominous pulsing, a wildness that finds dangerous resonance in the hearts of her characters. In the House of Blue Lights charts a rich and disturbing venture into the hidden lives of the people next door." —Don Kurtz"Susan Neville's genius as a writer is an ability to crack open the human character like a geode, and show us the strange, glittering crystal inside. . . . Her language shimmers like light coming through colored glass, and her subtle words uncover the inarticulate longings that burn the hearts of the most ordinary citizens. Susan Neville is one of the finest short story writers in the country." —Maura Stanton"In the House of Blue Lights dissolves the trimmed and tidied facade of Midwestern suburbia to reveal the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. Neville's fine stories of infidelity and faith, motherhood and madness, dogged acceptance and quiet hope chart the wide, restless orbit of the human heart." —A. Manette Ansay"Imagination demands 'a terrible accuracy,' says one of Susan Neville's characters. In this mesmerizing collection of stories, that is what Neville gives us-an accuracy of vision, a harrowing honesty, shot through with tenderness." —Scott Russell Sanders" . . .Susan Neville writes about people, especially women, on the verge, and invites us to watch her characters as they head for what comes next, to admire both the beauty and the menace that can coexist in the moment before something happens. Her prose has the feel of a tale told by someone left to piece things together afterward, exploring the 'maybes' in order to explain the almost unexplainable: human frailty, human passion and what occurs at their intersection." —The Washington Post
