Wild America: Stories

Stories deal with the wife of a white supremacist, a young widow, an eccentric husband, a jaded writer, a deranged teacher, and a woman with AIDS

Even in "Ken Kesey Day," the best of the 11 stories in this collection by the author of Between Pictures , Loader tends to patronize her characters, mainly victimized women and despicable men. That story, about a young woman who survived the flower-child stage when many of her peers did not, succeeds because the author displays compassion. For the most part, however, these tales skim tabloid events of the '70s and '80s: sexploitation in the slick, run-on sentences of "True Confessions," sexual abuse of children in "Saturday in the Barn," inner city crime in the title story, and the AIDs issue in "Kismet." Defined by what happens to them, not by who they are, Loader's characters pall quickly. Influenced superficially by Patricia Highsmith (invoked specifically in one of the stories), Loader has produced a repellent chronicle of shlock relieved by an occasional clever touch.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.