Home Remedies by Angela Pneuman

Home Remedies, stories by Angela Pneuman (Harcourt): In this dark and spirited debut collection, Pneuman mines the quirks of characters who hail from Kentucky to explore issues of religion, family, death, and sexual attraction. The eight fully realized stories featured here are sharp, well told, and—most important—fearless in their capacity to explore the contradictions both between and within characters. The prose lights up what in other hands might be dreary material: "Prudence figured that a cast-out demon would look like a puddle of split-pea soup the size of a welcome mat, and that it would move around the room, blob-like, trying to absorb its way into people." —Fred Leebron