In the Shadow of Our House

By Scott Blackwood

In Scott Blackwood's debut collection of thematically linked stories, people live on the cusp of the past and present, saddled with the knowledge that "sometimes what you're thinking can't be... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 087074464X
• ISBN13: 9780870744648
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ Pr
• Length: 170 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.8" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Poignant Snapshots

Blackwood pulls no punches in this blunt look at the modern American psyche. There are no tidy endings or ironic reversals. What we get are scraps from the lives of everyday Austin citizens struggling for wholeness, wracked with grief and regret. Blackwood's language is sparse and direct; no words are wasted. He makes the mundane drip with emotion, and captures the fleeting nature of intimacy in each vignette with broken marriages and estranged children. Fans of Faulkner, McCarthy, and Sam Mendes will find much to enjoy.

Powerful stories, unsettling

This writer reminds me of a youngish John Cheever or Faulkner who happened to turn his eye, not on the dissipated affluent or dispossessed Southerners, but on the otherworldly everyday, in Austin, Texas. Characters nurture their secrets, build fire balloons in search of redemption, and take their smoke breaks with the dead, like Jonestown's Jim Jones. Fine, haunting writing. The characters stay with you, afterimages of where things went wrong and can't quite be made right.