SOURLAND Stories of Loss, Grief, and Forgetting

The 16 short stories in SOURLAND manage to fascinate and repel at the same time. Coleen Marlo masterfully tackles the works' challenges, painting vivid portraits of loss, gothic extremes, and violence with the range these diverse tales require. She employs subtle shifts of emphasis while maintaining clear storytelling personas. Individual characters come to life as Oates weaves magical situations with clever analogies, sensual observations, sexual tumult, and her signature depictions of perversions and gory details. Marlo imbues even the many secondary characters with strong variations. We hear in her voice awed and baffled children, sad adults, frightened and resigned victims, harsh criminals, and all of their innocence, despair, tension, and anger. Her vocal urgency, tempered often by tragic whimsy, scales the heights of mounting violence, then descends into the depths of sorrow. A.W. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine [Published: MARCH 2011]