Black Light: Stories is a 2019 anthology of short stories by American author Kimberly King Parsons. Set in modern-day rural America, the stories involve characters who bear complex and stigmatizing burdens, including mental illness, poverty, and isolation, with great resilience. At the same time, Parsons illuminates how self-preservation can come at a cost: some of her characters put themselves on sure paths to self-destruction with their obstinacy and self-centeredness. The collection deals with common problems in rural America, including drug and alcohol use, bullying, abuse, and adultery, but celebrates how individuals transcend these systemic problems with their unique adaptations and virtues. The anthology consists of twelve stories. It opens with the story “Guts,” in which a woman named Sheila describes her dating life with Tim, a medical student. Sheila silently deals with body dysmorphia, a problem that worsens with her continued exposure to and compulsive interest in bodies and diseases. She starts to abuse alcohol to dull her painful insecurities about her weight and looks. At the end of the story, Sheila appears at Tim’s hospital, drunk and distressed. Rather than be embarrassed or turn her away from his workplace, Tim consoles her and calms her insecurities by affectionately touching and describing the different parts of her body. “In Our Circle” also presents an optimistic story of mental illness. Here, an unnamed narrator remembers his time at a mental hospital. Isolated and on the brink of despair, the hospital’s recreation program became his saving grace. He enrolled in an art class, where an art instructor helped participants express themselves through clay modeling. This form of art therapy worked wonders on the narrator. Eventually, he was discharged from the hospital, bringing clay with him to continue his art therapy practice in the real world. The story “Foxes” focuses on the literary trope of the <a href="http://www.supersummary.com/epic/">epic</a> journey and its ability to capture modern problems. In the story, an alcoholic mother listens to her daughter tell a made-up fairy tale about a noble warrior who travels through a dangerous forest, defeating legions of evil foes. As the mother listens, she recalls the abusive and neglectful relationship she had with her daughter’s father and its culmination in their recent divorce. The story helps the mother realize that both she and her ex-husband were responsible for their bitter marriage, enabling each other’s reckless drinking and fighting. At the end of the girl’s story, the knight defeats a formless dark shape that blocks the path between him and his lost child. The mother realizes that the story is an extended metaphor for her parents’ marriage and the obstacle it became for her daughter. Other stories present less optimistic pictures of their characters’ struggles, especially when they involve mental illness or occur in isolation. In “The Soft No,” two young siblings live with their mother, who is deeply mentally ill. Besides feeling responsible for regulating her mood—an impossible task—the children constantly calculate whether their mother is well enough for them to have friends over. Together, they bear this stigmatizing and alienating burden in silence. The narrator of “The Light Will Pour in” recalls a road trip he once took across the country with his much younger girlfriend, Trish, after running away from his wife. They had previously met in church, where Trish sang in the choir and the narrator attended with his wife and child. After they skipped town together, the narrator realized that his fantasy of Trish was not the reality. They fought bitterly for months before settling down in a small town in Texas. There, Trish developed an alcohol addiction, and the narrator yearned for the previous life he had squandered. Black Light’s stories present few outcomes in terms of good and bad, instead illuminating the moral complexities of rural life.

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Kimberly King Parsons

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Short Story Collection

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