THE title story in this impressive and accomplished debut collection imagines the emotional ache of the doctor in Jonestown, Guyana, who discovered the followers of Jim Jones after they drank that infamous cyanide-laced punch. The doctor, now retired and back home in Texas, is dying himself (of cancer), but the memory of all those bodies -- Families. Limbs intertwined. Mothers sprawled over children'' -- has become ''the axis around which his life winds.'' In the course of things, Joseph Conrad is quoted, but the story is more original than that -- in its point of view, for instance. ''In the Shadow of Our House'' is narrated by the collective ''we'' of the doctor's neighbors. (''If you had lived long on our street and drunk late at our parties,'' it begins.) The neighbors do more than the usual unburdening of themselves, so we learn a fair bit of their individual histories. But at the story's center is a hallucinatory scene in which the doctor dreams about confronting Jones, who can give no more satisfying an account of the tragedy than ''Words fail.'' ''That's it?'' the doctor asks. ''Words fail?''
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Blackwood penetrates life's shadows with disarming candor, piercing the gloom Of contemporary domesticity in a debut collection of nine powerful and poignant short stories. Each resonates with the stark reality born of desolation. Intricately subtle, resolutely ambiguous, Blackwood's stories benefit from multiple visits, encouraging the reader to peel back layer after tenuous layer on a provocative voyage of discovery. Disaffected teenagers, divorced parents, dejected lovers--all face relentless scrutiny as Blackwood probes the camouflaged insecurities, doubts, and betrayals that lead to the dissolution of families and relationships. Elegiac and contemplative, Blackwood's angst-ridden characters face life's major and minor challenges with discouraging results: reconciliations disenchant; marriages disintegrate; parenthood disappoints.
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A strong debut collection about family disasters and betrayals explores ordinary dramas extraordinarily. Forced change--death and divorce--descend on these characters who are all caught in a kind of purgatory between happiness and failure, unsure which way to turn and often acting out criminally as a result.
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