Train Shots: Stories — Vanessa Blakeslee

A single mother rents a fundamentalist preacher's carriage house. A pop star contemplates suicide in the hotel where Janis Joplin died. A philandering ex-pat doctor gets hooked on morphine while reeling from his wife's death. And in the title story, a train engineer, after running over a young girl on his tracks, grapples with the pervasive question -- what propels a life toward such a disastrous end? Rendered in a style both generous and intelligent, Vanessa Blakeslee's vivid and diverse debut collection portrays characters caught at the crossroads of the possible and the inevitable.