FICTION

LEGACIES: Stories by Starling Lawrence (Farrar Straus & Giroux: $22; 243 pp.). Some New England writers really know how to send a chill whistling through your bones. First they create the aura of normalcy, methodically building on the details of daily life, and then they scare you with astonishing cruelty or brutality or the terrifying explosion after too much pressure builds from too much isolation. In these stories, a 7-year-old boy whose rigid lawyer father will not grant him what he thinks is a simple favor punishes his father by placing in his briefcase a long-hidden packet of love letters from an unknown suitor to his wife. An unfaithful husband, lulled into a cold-hearted relationship, is taught by his mistress the fine art of pain infliction during sex, until he barely recognizes his own personality.

The stories are artfully constructed, with precipice endings and fearsomely unpredictable characters who say utterly predictable things. There’s a theme of character being built or undone in the lives of Lawrence’s people, genetic legacies, childhood memories that dictate decades of behavioral patterns. They lodge in the marrow, these stories, as good as winter.