Review: ‘Beneath The Bonfire’

In the acknowledgments at the end of 'Beneath the Bonfire,” Nickolas Butler opens with: 'Infinite thanks to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where most of these stories were born.” Readers should be grateful, too.

Butler is the author of the novel 'Shotgun Lovesongs,” a beautiful book in which five narrators relate the story of their shared lives. The book, which deservedly garnered several awards, including the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, is an affecting investigation of the human heart as well as of the Midwestern landscape.

The stories in 'Beneath the Bonfire” are of a piece with 'Shotgun Lovesongs” - set in the Midwest, alive with emotion - but the collection has a thread of darkness running through it.

'Sweet Light Crude,” for example, is a straight up noir tale of an aging and ill eco-terrorist who agrees to one last job seeking retribution for an oil spill. Set primarily in a remote cabin in the woods and focused squarely on two men in a battle of wills with potentially deadly consequences, 'Sweet Light Crude” would be at home in many a crime anthology.

The noir label could apply to several of the stories, as violence and sex are prominent features. But it is the experience of loss - feared and realized - that truly binds these stories together. In every piece in the collection, a person comes face to face with the loss of something he or she fears can't be lived without. As a result, most of the stories could be located somewhere on a continuum of sadness.

The closing story, however, offers something else. Loss is certainly present in 'Apples,” but its protagonist - a man who has lost much and may soon lose more - is given a gift of perspective that changes his life profoundly. Butler brings his collection to a close with a spark of hope arising from the bonfires set elsewhere in the book.