PLACES; Eight Place Stories

These stories explore the relationship between physical places and the lives of people in them or affected by them. The different places – an abandoned factory, a lonely beach in winter, a beer joint, an old water tank, a cemetery and others – elicit all kinds of responses from all kinds of people: a collection of long-dead spirits, a curmudgeon who blames changes in his environment for his dementia, various eccentrics with fixations, and many basically good-hearted people who struggle with themselves and others in ways shaped by the places where they happen to be. These are old-fashioned stories that will leave you with something. You may laugh, be creeped out, subtly aroused, or moved to sympathy. You may object to some of the endings. But, unlike some contemporary, avant garde fiction exercises, these straightforward stories won’t leave you in a complete fog wondering what was going on and why.