FICTION

WHERE THE ROAD BOTTOMS OUT: Stories by Victoria Redel. (Knopf: $20; 171 pp.) “Spade was a boy, a lemon drop of a boy, a rakish spunk of a boy and I was Ellie, blind as a watchman who slept outside a burning town. I will say rain came. It is true what they say about thirst.” Or this: “Home is blood-thinning aspirin and a blue and white and a round pill and where we lie on her bed until some colorless hour when my mother, tongue thick and roamy, will drift to sleep or wake from sleep, shrilling about her cramping foot.” When a writer loves language and can play with it right in front of you, something ecstatic happens. It goes all putty and see-through, it doesn’t hide or obscure its own meaning but opens door after “Alice in Wonderland” door, tunneling through the reader’s experience and the author’s and the character’s to some red-hot true thing about life.

A true thing glitters, jewel-like, at the heart of each of these stories, usually a childhood fear, but often the animal fears of parents. In the chilling story “A Day in the Park,” a mother buries her two boys alive, them saying, “Mom, can we go home now,” “Mom . . . pretend you eat me up,” her saying, “What a delicious morsel of a boy. Such delicious deliciousness.” Her love for them not even a question but the layer of insanity too thick to penetrate. In the ominous story “China,” Ellie tries to protect her brother from their Aunt. Characters have childlike wish lives and real lives, and where the two worlds collide in almost every story, the true thing bleeds out.