Loose Connections

The 16 stories in this collection bear the hard-edged reality of everyday events, even as they meld with the fantastic. In ``Acid Rain'' a woman's obsession with a former lover is made palpable in the painful excesses by which she expresses unrequited passion. Former lovers are troubling memories to two women in ``Rubble,'' as an aunt and her visiting niece find a common focus for the bitterness in their lives; meanwhile, the older woman systematically and manically destroys her house. In the surreal vein, ``The Gulag Computer: Dead Souls in the Terminal'' provides a ghoulish trip through an afterlife where the dead are slaves to incessantly demanding word processors, constantly complaining: ``I found a hair in the delete mode.'' A mordant humor surfaces in the reversal of stereotypical sex roles in ``Flotsam and Jetsam'' where the female narrator catalogues the male attributes she fancies. Shard-like aspects of the mostly downside of contemporary living are delineated in these vibrantly expressive tales. (June)