In the House of Blue Lights (Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction) - Softcover

Neville, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0268011842 ISBN 13: 9780268011840

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998

Synopsis

A collection of short stories by Susan Neville. The house referred to in the title is a specific place in midwestern American 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.

About this title

Review

" . . .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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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 Lightscharts a rich and disturbing venture into the hidden lives of the people next door."--Don Kurtz

"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

"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

"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

From the Publisher

Praise for In The House of Blue Lights
"Color and light are played like the keys of an oldtime theater organ in this virtuoso book, winner of the 1998 Richard Sullivan Prize from the University of Notre Dame Press. As a study of the mystery underlying the mundane middle of America, it conjures Neville's early influence, William H. Gass' IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY: but it's less polemical, more poetic, more philosophical, possibly even more sensual. Neville writes for grownups, in every sense the term implies. As she did in her 1994 collection of essays and stories, INDIANA WINTER, Neville casts a haunting aura around familiar Midwestern events and lifestyles by making us view them from unfamiliar angles. The effect, when it comes to the true stories on which some of these fictional narratives are based, provokes and satisfies as no news account can. The chilling pleasure of this book, more of a rush than running to ring the doorbell of the House of Blue Lights on Halloween, is the implic! ation that reality surpasses fantasy. Sure, there's no spook house to get us. But maybe there's no house at all, nothing to hold us and keep us, no sanctuary in this state of mind that is the heart of the heart of the country." —Indianapolis Star, June 21, 1998

"IN THE HOUSE OF BLUE LIGHTS...takes us inside suburban houses, and the houses inside of those houses, in an arresting and probing hunt for our own souls...Neville repeats images to hypnotic effect: blue pools and blue eyes; glass, light and darkness: mothers, wives, daughters and the houses they must navigate. Each is woven through story after story with such skill that when you finish, as in the best story collections, you feel you have read one fluid and continuing narrative. This book is both beautiful and devastating, and the most satisfying story collection I've read in years." —Launa Hall, The Sycamore Review

"IN THE HOUSE OF BLUE LIGHTS dissolves the trimmed and tidied facade of Midwester! n suburbia to reveal the extraordinary lives of ordinary pe! ople. 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

"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

"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

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0268011842
• ISBN 13: 9780268011840
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 180