Thief of Lives: Stories

In powerful stories of solitude and family, the characters in Thief of Lives grapple with the relentless forces of change. "Whatever it is, whatever threatens us," says a father to his son in "Journey to the Center of the Earth," "you might as well boil it all down to something you can prepare for. Can do something about. And start doing it." Visiting his father's religious community, where residents urgently prepare for the end of the world, Jerome longs to re-create the orderly family life that ended years ago with his parents' divorce.
Sometimes Reed's characters do not long for the past, they are tormented by it. Nearly drowned in a submarine accident, Alvah is haunted by the twelve dead men shut forever behind a watertight door in "In the Squalus." Martin revisits a terrifying and exhilarating night of winter revelry that brings him back from the brink of madness in "Thing of Snow."
Forced to become the annual baker of strawberry pies for the summer picnic, Eleanor Goodman is stifled by the overpowering love and tradition of her husband's family in "Fourth of July." But soon she will discover the delicate bonds of fear and understanding that link her inextricably to the other Goodman women. In the deeply moving title story, "Thief of Lives," a woman's startling revelations about her longtime friends bring another poignant recognition of the fragile abundance of family.
"It's not what happens to you that makes the difference. It's how you handle it," insists the beautifully preserved mother in "Queen of the Beach." Fighting age and gravity, she assaults her plain daughter, Sally, with lipstick and color analysis. "You either go forward or you give up," she contends.
In this remarkable, unified collection, Kit Reed brings us superbly realized characters who - threatened by the predictable forces of age or the unpredictable forces of disaster - press on, one step ahead of the inevitable. Their small triumphs and bittersweet defeats make Thief of Lives a wise and haunting look at people very much like ourselves.

Reed is an accomplished short story writer and novelist (the pseudonymous Gone is her current, critically acclaimed, psychological thriller) who in these 15 stories shows an uncanny eye for domestic anguish. She's by no means a one-note writer, however; the stories are enormously varied in tone and approach, and even in degree of success. After serving as a submariner in WW II, a man is haunted for the rest of his life by the death of his brothers in arms; a former priest tries desperately to keep his marriage together; a lonely divorcee cares too much about her children to allow them to be treated lightly by someone she's just met; a group of borderline mental patients builds a snow dinosaur in competition for a deranged girl; an overwhelming mother's dashing self-image forces her to walk miles through the sand on a cut foot; a son runs his father to ground in a banal end-of-the-world cult. Reed understands them all, and renders their situations, and their sometimes surprising resolutions, in swift, observant prose, with note-perfect dialogue. Only when she attempts surrealism (The Protective Pessimist) or overly glib satire (Academic Novel) does she seem less than surefootedly involved, though she is never less than clever.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.