Susan Neville - Böcker

In the House of Blue Lights is an award-winning collection of short stories by Susan Neville. The house referred to in the title is a specific place in midwestern folklore, but the blue also refers to the blue of the globe as seen from space and the blue lights that flicker behind closed eyelids in the house of the imagination."It was January when he brought her here. She had accepted that on the maps of the world there were these green and brown places called continents floating in the cradle of blue, and that these continents had centers and that she would be living there and that it would take her for the rest of her life at least a full day, by train, to reach the ocean. She married my grandfather believing that their river would be blue. She pictured something like the Gulf, a warm vein in a landscape she'd seen only in photographs or paintings. She had never in her life seen snow. She pictured her married self as a blue-eyed princess living by the blue water in a world of snow and ice. With a blue sky that stretched from east to west . . .But you know how, when you head north toward the Great Lakes, somewhere in Tennessee or Kentucky you can see ahead of you, in the winter months, how the sky lowers its slab of gray and there's that line of opaque clouds like a wool blanket being pulled up over your head until you can't see anything outside of it?" —Excerpt from "Blue" by Susan Neville, In the House of Blue Lights

Susan Neville combines a gift for language with a subtle eye and a fine instinct for character. Her characters—and her settings—are, most of them, midwestern. There is the staunchly midwestern wife in the story "Kentucky People," for instance. She was born in this house in this Indiana town, a world far removed from people like Mrs. Lovelace, next door, transient people "who have followed the industrial revolution from Kentucky to Indiana and most of whom are now in Texas." Nothing really out of the way has ever happened to her. Now she "shivers with excitement" when she is called upon to help Mrs. Lovelace throw her husband out—helps her haul all of his belongings out onto the porch: underwear, shoes, whiskey bottles, rolltop desk, even "wedding presents from his side of the family."The collection moves from the playful tone of "Johnny Appleseed," in which the author takes an old fecundity myth and does something different with it, to the wise and poignant story of an elderly woman attending a family gathering at which she recognizes the separateness from her children and grandchildren that the cancer within her has given her. It has been months since any one of them has kissed her on the mouth. There are so many things that she would like to tell them, "but they don't want to talk about it, each one of them positive that he is the one human being in the history of the earth who will never ever die."All of the stories in this unusual first collection stick in the reader's mind long after he has read them.