Light in the Crossing

Turbulent human emotions and the merciless natural world color Meyers's collection of 12 stories of rural life, set in Catheresque Cloten, S.D. An intriguing tale, ""The Smell of the Deer,"" reworks the myth of Actaeon, giving us a sense of atavistic forces underlying the small town order. Jerrod Sinclair, who is so at home in nature that he can track deer by smell, is seduced by a mysterious woman he meets in the woods. When he returns to the woods the following spring, married, his lover spurns him, and Jerrod eventually dies of the disappointment. His widow, Sara, is then befriended by a newcomer, an ""ageless"" woman named Diane (read Diana), who buys Sara a puppy, which leads indirectly to Sara's gruesome end. The title story concerns two teenage boys who spend one summer playing a complicated version of chicken with their cars on country roads. Tony, the boy who suggests the game, and Robert, the narrator, are drawn by that troubling alchemy of adolescent friendships, the unsettling bond of family tensions. In ""Bird Shadows"" an unnamed daughter returns to her father's farm after her divorce. She wants the land, but her father intends to sell it. In his mind, it is cursed, the place where his father jumped from a silo. For her it is a refuge. The account of their crossed purposes is neatly embedded in the story of how the father originally chose the farm over the woman he loved best, and the regret he still feels. Myers (The River Warren) gives voice to the unreconciled oppositions of country life--its solid satisfactions and its sometimes unbearable narrowness--in these harsh, strongly felt stories. (Aug.)