In House of Blue Lights - by Susan Neville (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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

Review Quotes

" . . .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

"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

"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 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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"Troubled relationships among everyday people take center stage in this heart-wrenching short-story collection set in the Midwest." --Chicago Tribune

About the Author

Susan Neville is the Demia Butler Professor of English at Butler University. She is the author of The Invention of Flight, winner of the 1984 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and Indiana Winter (1994).