THE KING OF LIMBO: And Other Stories

Harun's debut is a disparate collection of delicately crafted, intelligent stories that have gained attention individually, though read together they lack cohesion. The narrator of the title story is a boy named William who has just reluctantly celebrated his sixth birthday in the midst of confusion over his parents' breakup; his dog, Goodwood, found during the spring his parents married, is dying of cancer, and William wants desperately to believe in the wisdom and nobility of the knights in castles he reads about. In the opening story, "Lukudi" (meaning "wealthmagic"), a young Nigerian man, Natife, who appears as William's friend in the title tale, devotes his old world village healing powers to the peer counseling of a disturbed 16-year-old Connecticut girl whom he visits as part of his school's extra credit program. Natife is convinced that "someone was doing juju" on the girl, Ally Reisch, who has "the pink rheumy eyes and frail blondness of an old woman on her way to bone and ash." His gift to her, a lighter given in a joyful impulse, is the instrument of her first and only act of salvation. Harun plays with the reader's expectations, though wisely does not give in to them, best evidenced in a perplexing, brief tale about unexplained human disappearances that won a Story magazine competition, "The Unseen Ear of God." In another gently paced piece, "The Eighth Sleeper of Ephesus" (winner of the Nelson Algren Award), an old man who seems destroyed by the death of his beloved wife takes on a startling, tender new persona in letters he writes to a newspaper. The potential that Harun reveals in this collection is immense, though a more tightly focused collection or a novel might showcase her strengths to better effect. (Nov.)