In Just the Right Light by William R. Soldan
Rust Belt, USA, where steel is dead, hope is scarce, and hardship is a way of life. Miles Junction is but one of many Northeastern Ohio towns long forgotten and left behind, its residents living on the cusp of financial, emotional, even spiritual destitution. An old trapper becomes the scapegoat for a boy’s brutal murder. An out-of-work diesel mechanic resorts to crime in order to provide for his wife and son. A teenage girl braves a brutal winter storm to protect a tragic secret. A recovering drug addict wrestles with temptation and bears the weight of an uncertain future. These and the other working-class characters that populate this collection know struggle intimately and understand that desperate times often call for desperate measures. Their lives are linked by a ruined yet starkly beautiful post-industrial landscape—a desolate vestige of our fractured American dream. Taking place during the last few decades of the twentieth century and those following the new millennium, In Just the Right Light is a glimpse at one region’s bleak inheritance and the precarious lives of those who remain to rummage through the fallout of its past.
Details
Genre: Fiction
Availability: All retailers incl. Amazon
Formats: Paperback; Ebook
Publication Date: March 12, 2019
Reviews
“In this beautifully rendered debut collection, the lives of everyday people just trying to make it one day to the next are painted in hues both dark and bright, exposing the world and landscape of America’s Rustbelt in just the right light. A heartfelt reading experience that will linger for a long time to come.”
—Christopher Barzak, author of One for Sorrow and Wonders of the Invisible World
“William R. Soldan’s people live with the realities of violence and terrible childhoods, jail and hard living, all the stuff of grit literature, but seen by the grim light through a cracked window. In story after story, there’s a craftsman’s eye for undiluted heart-crushing detail that can kill you with a simple-sounding sentence, stories in which a hundred bucks might cure everything and heroin addicts and twelve-steppers alike go off-course one last time before foundering in new but not exactly better waters. These stories are rock-solid revelations.”
—Rusty Barnes, author of Reckoning and Knuckledragger
“In Just the Right Light is a book of snapshots and alleyways leading us to heartbreak, tough choices and tiny victories. These stories continually challenge and return us to our own shortcomings and a world in need of repair. William R. Soldan’s fiction echoes a wide and daring landscape, from championing people society unfairly dismisses, to providing hope to those desperately yearning for second chances. Soldan makes us uncomfortable. He forces us to see the world for what it is rather than what we may want to believe it to be. He gives faces to the often faceless, he solicits our sympathy for the often unsympathetic. His characters strive to be better. And by doing so Soldan makes us want to strive to better ourselves. Together, these stories are a collection of risks. And American prose needs more risks like them.”
—Eric Wasserman, author of Celluloid Strangers and The Temporary Life
“Some readers of these stories may feel that darkness is the dominant note—literal darkness, but even more the darkness of pain, poverty, loneliness, human ignorance; but I am struck by the tenderness that brings light to so many of them: the characters who give where they see a lack, who teach what someone desperately needs to know, who bring compassion just when the world seems to be entirely without it. Soldan has a clear eye and a big heart, and the hard world he depicts with such skill in these pages is redeemed again and again by quiet acts of love and hope.”
—Steven Reese, author of Enough Light to Steer By and American Dervish