cover image Descending Fire and Other Stories

Descending Fire and Other Stories

John Allman. New Directions Publishing Corporation, $19.95 (168pp) ISBN 978-0-8112-1274-8

In this fiction debut comprised of eight stories, Allman celebrates New York City's anarchy; its millions of individualists and their neuroses, pressured jobs, rocky marriages, unfulfilled dreams. Author of four books of poetry (Curve Away from Stillness), he lyrically explores working-and middle-class lives from the 1950s to 1993 with cool understated beauty, touches of fantasy and the complexity of an Andre Dubus. A bar waitress who walks out on her husband becomes the victim of date rape and unexpectedly finds herself back with her mate (``Courtship''). Elsewhere, a night watchman suspects that a co-worker's fatal factory accident was foul play, and that he himself may be the next target (``The Tower''). In the funny and poignant title story, a psychologist undergoes acupuncture as he broods, among other matters, on his inability to conceive a baby with his wife and on a juvenile-delinquent patient who reports visits from angels. In ``The Substitute,'' an emerald's inexplicable materialization and disappearance signifies to an elderly, psychic Croatian-American woman that both she and her brain-damaged granddaughter may die. Even eerier is ``A Chronic Case,'' a lurid family drama of murder, adultery and time-travel in the Bronx, where a convict father desperately pursues his alienated daughter through the decades. (Sept.)