I AM DANGEROUS by Greg Johnson...

I AM DANGEROUS by Greg Johnson (The Johns Hopkins University Press: $13.95, 209 pp., paperback original). The atmosphere of the modern South pervades these stories by the O. Henry Award winner. Johnson’s unhappy people strive to do what is right, but their efforts bring them into conflict with their partners, parents and siblings. In “The Scene of the Crime,” a daughter watches in resignation as her mother shops for unneeded clothes; the strained subtext of a parental visit drives a successful young woman into a nearly suicidal depression in “Evening at Home.” The narrator of the tragic “House of Trees” typifies Johnson’s uncomprehending characters when he says of his mother, “Like the mothers of my neighborhood friends, she seemed a familiar and unchanging domestic fixture, like the refrigerator or the bathroom tub.”