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Dennis Lehane's new short-story collection, Coronado, is an apt reminder that the master of crime and literary fiction (Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone) is also a proficient short-story writer.
Only one story in Coronado -- Mushrooms -- has never been published before. But all the stories, written between 1999 and 2005, are character-driven and pick at the origins of violent behavior.
In Running out of Dog, set in tiny Eden, S.C., love and all its unrequited frustrations are wrapped in a melancholy story about Blue, a small-town loser who loses his grip on his meager slice of happiness. He runs out of stray dogs to shoot, and Jewel Lut, the woman he loves from afar, decides to stay with her abusive husband. Hope is a dangerous thing for someone like Blue, and murder is the true test of friendship, as Blue's friend Elgin makes a decision that puts his own future in the cross hairs.
In ICU, an innocent man hides from his unidentified pursuers in the local intensive-care units. His life, which seemed to have no meaning before, takes on the patina of nurturing solace as he consoles relatives of gravely ill patients and is comforted in return.
Gone Down to Corpus is a superbly crafted tale of how the hopelessness of a disaffected youth spurs a teenager to go on a destructive rampage in a local home. His aggression is stoked by a desperate search for that "blaze of light" that his father couldn't find, either. "I think about what my daddy said about how he would have died earlier had he known what the world was going to bring."
Mushrooms, about a revenge killing, displays how violence and abuse rob its victims of youth, hope and optimism.
Lehane saves the best for last with Until Gwen, a story about Bobby, a young man who has survived prison and a shootout but who drowned in his own personal hell years before. It is in this story that Lehane constructs one of the most diabolical fathers ever put on paper.
Until Gwen is followed by Coronado, a two-act play that builds on Bobby's story and cycles through the events that hard-wired his family's sorry state.
Short-story collections can be a tough sell for readers, but think of them as the perfect medium for our short attention spans. And who better to entertain the newcomer to the genre than an author whose stories make us dig deep down into our own hopes and fears.
Coronado
By Dennis Lehane
William Morrow, 232 pp., $24.95
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