Shelter

A meticulous writer of luminous prose whose books appear at too rare intervals, Phillips here limns a dark, richly imagined story of evil confronting innocence in an Edenic atmosphere. Set in the West Virginia Appalachians in 1963, the narrative builds toward the fateful encounter of a group of polar opposites: four Girl Guide campers come into violent collision with a former convict, Carmody; his young son, Buddy, whom he cruelly abuses; and Parson, a Bible-obsessed, half-demented loner who considers himself God's instrument and is Carmody's nemesis. While it's obvious that Carmody and Parson are society's outcasts, the four girls also carry dark secrets. Alma Swenson has been forced to become an accomplice to her mother's affair with Nickel Campbell, the father of Alma's best friend, Delia; now Delia is fatherless after Nickel's suicide. Meanwhile, Alma's older sister, Lenny is burdened by repressed memories of her father's molestation, and her best friend, Cap Briarly, has been abandoned by her cold mother. Phillips reveals the emotional wellsprings of their behavior slowly, in a narrative permeated with sexual tension and a rising sense of menace. As she demonstrated in Machine Dreams , she is sensitive to children's thoughts and impressions; vulnerable, resourceful Buddy steals the reader's heart. She also gets girls' banter just right, but her real achievement is in conveying Parson's inchoate religious fervor and Carmody's vicious, drunken outbursts. Her prose is highly charged yet tightly controlled, palpable with intense visual imagery. The novel has a few lapses: some scenes are too mystic and opaque; some symbols (a snake, in particular) are over-emphasized. But the denouement, in which the main characters come together in a dramatic, almost cinematic confrontation, reconfirms Phillips as a masterly writer. Author tour. (Sept.)