In This Light: New and Selected Stories

by Melanie Rae Thon

A vibrant selection of stories from the author of Sweet Hearts and First, Body

This selection of Melanie Rae Thon's stories showcases her breathtaking ability to become each one of her characters, to move inside the bodies and minds of the dispossessed. One woman speaks for them all: "I'm your worst fear. But not the worst thing that can happen."

In This Light shimmers with grace as a drunk young woman hits a Native American man on a desolate Montana road, a grieving slave murders the white child she nurses and loves, and two throwaway kids dance in the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree in a stranger's house. Thon's searing prose reveals that the radiant heat inside us all is the hope and hunger for love.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published May 24, 2011

About the author

Melanie Rae Thon is a Professor of English at the University of Utah.

Reviews

[Calvin Glover · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is my good fortune to attend a fiction workshop taught by Melanie Rae Thon at the University of Utah. I knew I had to get in her class after reading this collection of some of her stories. She is an incredibly powerful writer. Her characters are often violent or destructive, but they are never clichéd. She writes with an unflinching honesty coupled with compassion. You have the sense that every sentence has been carefully crafted; every word meticulously selected. Some day, when I grow up, I hope to be able to write half as well.

[Melanie Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

In This Light is one of the oldest collections on my shelf of books I own. I purchased it at a reading in 2011 (it was published by Graywolf Press that year) and met the author. I picked her up at the airport and was invited to a (free) pre-reading dinner at the pricey inn on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. This was before I took notes at readings, so I don’t have anything to add about the author other than I remember at dinner she ate only steamed vegetables and she admired my colorful dress.

I had previously read Thon’s collection of short stories called Girls in the Grass (1991) and her novel Sweet Hearts (2001). In This Light contains new short stories and some old ones from the collections Girls in the Grass and First, Body. I knew Thon’s style was visceral and dark, and that she uses Native American characters in many stories, though I’m not sure she’s Native American herself. She grew up in Montana and has said, “I’m fascinated with the way conflict and solace come together in Native American history.” Most of the stories in the collection are set in Montana (and some in the town where Thon was raised).

In This Light is 266 pages long, but it went by so quickly when I was reading. It was disconcerting to note a short story that clocked in at 40 pages, but then feel great joy in getting carried away and reading the whole thing in one sitting. Thon comes from an academic and literary tradition — she herself has taught creative writing at a number of universities — so the sentences are more challenging to dig into. Thus, stopping the experience of reading to analyze a single sentence can lead to confusion. It’s so easy to flow along in the head of a narrator that pausing to reflect can destroy the poetic story building. For instance, here is a passage that makes perfect sense in the flow of things, but stopping to analyze the language leaves me scratching my head:

Sometimes when I dream, the night I met Vincent Blew is just a movie I’m watching. Every body is huge. Yellow Dog’s brilliant face fills the screen. He grins. He hangs on to that torch too long. I try to close my eyes, but the lids won’t come down. His body bursts, shards of light; his body tears the sky apart. Then everything’s on fire: pond, grass, hair — boy’s breath, red shirt.

My solution was to NOT stop and dig deeper, but to enjoy the story itself. That worked beautifully.

Several of the stories describe children, especially girls, who turn nearly feral without supportive parents. They break into homes to shower, use drugs, dance wildly in a way that suggests emotional deterioration as they try to hang on to their humanity.

But in one story, a poverty-stricken woman collects all the abandoned children in her community and tries to care for them. Thon makes it clear that when children and parents are separated, it’s unlikely they will reunite. There is a line that children are forced to cross, and when they do, they can’t return:

Out here in the woods, down in The Child Dump, everybody was half-human. If you stole groceries to eat in Depot Park, you could convince yourself you might go home someday, scrub yourself clean, eat at your mother’s table. But if one day in August you got so hungry you ate crackling bugs rolled in leaves, you had to believe you’d turned part lizard and grown the nub of a tail.

Thanks to Thon’s choice to write stories in various points of view (past or present, first or third), readers get a variety of experiences with characters coming from different backgrounds, from the fringe of society sentenced to death to the privileged who are forgiven their crimes. It’s easy to remain in whatever point of view in which the story was written, to get sucked into the lived experience of a character who watches a storm cloud brew over life.

I was glad I read In This Light, not only because it is the first short story collection I’ve read in over 16 months (!), but because it is a smart, compelling collection written by an author whose dream-like prose gels beautifully with her unique narratives.

This review was originally published at Grab the Lapels

[Rachel Lu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn’t finish all of it but some of the stories read like Walmart versions of Toni Morrison or Carson McCullers.

[Michael]

My review from the Missoula Independent:

In This Light, by Montana-raised writer Melanie Rae Thon, is a brutally lucid new collection. Reading the nine stories seems akin to being electrocuted and then wading into a frigid body of water nine times in succession—only to realize that you love every step of the way. What I'm trying to say is that this is a damn fine collection of short fiction. You don't merely read this book, you listen carefully to its spellbinding rhythms, and once you've recovered from its unflinching outlook, all you want to do is read it again. And then again. And maybe once more to make sure you've absorbed it all.

Raised in Kalispell and now a teacher at the University of Utah, Thon is the author of four novels (including Sweet Hearts) and was deemed a Best Young American Novelist by Granta magazine. In This Light—handpicked from her two previous collections of short gems and supplemented by three unpublished stories—displays an uncanny ability to disrupt and to restructure our senses in settings so darkly intimate they seem to be vignettes from a very dysfunctional memoir.

Like Flannery O'Connor without the Catholic undertones (Thon's secular mysticism concerns the body and the mind, as opposed to any overt Christian deity), her impressionistic prose is so reflective of her artistic vision that these tales read as though she's pursuing some elusive theme. Characters exist on the fringes of consciousness. Horrible things are always about to happen to the innocent and corrupt alike. Hope is a transient moment spotlighted for an instant and left to casually slip away. A writer's writer, Thon told Bomb magazine she was influenced early on by Faulkner and Toni Morrison (and also by her native state and its topography: "No matter how long I live somewhere else, those images are embedded in ways I can't escape," she says of Montana), and while their lingering inspiration is present, she holds her own as a poetic stylist.

Likewise, Thon's storylines are never linear, but seem as though to take place behind a window of frosted glass. In what is arguably the finest crystallization of Thon's daring story-telling, "Punishment" is based on the hanging of a wronged slave girl in 1858, for the murder of the unreliable narrator's brother; the story manages to both convey the barbaric mindset of a pre-Civil War slave-owning family, and also dig into the primitive taboos that have remained a part of our collective psyche.

"Father, Lover, Deadman, Dreamer" concerns a girl who runs down and kills a drunken American Indian on a lonely Montana road and the subsequent help from her good-hearted father in covering up the crime. But these stories don't jolt the reader because of any graphic shocks (although there are a few of those, too); instead, they always stun with the author's crisply precise use of language and imagery, such as this passage from "Iona Moon":

"Daddy sat on the porch with Leon and Rafe and Dale. They rocked in the great silence of men, each with his pipe, each with the same tilt of the head as if a single thought wove through their minds."

That alone could teach a short course on descriptive writing.

Some of the collected works here are undoubtedly more powerful than others. The snapshot of an unconscious girl in a refrigerator in the middle of a field, from "Necessary Angels," will stay with me far longer than I would like, whereas "Tu B'Shvat", the lengthiest and weakest of the selections, is by turns probing, meandering and overlong. But even with her less viscerally startling pieces, Thon is a master of encapsulating volumes of beauty and dread in a single tale, and making each sentence resemble a new form of expression.

In This Light haunts like a well-constructed, moody nightmare, best savored in small doses. Her themes are those of the Greek tragedians: merciless lust that manifests as incest and rape, violent men and quietly desperate women and carnal metamorphosis. Alcoholism and prostitution are thrown in for good measure. And yet, Thon raises these stories beyond gritty realism and into the lyricism of compassion and understanding. Thon's voice is her plot: her graceful images like a chorus dissecting her characters innermost flaws. Behind the ageless horror and veneration of the body, the forbidden acts and the monologues with dead people, In This Light is about common individuals draped in longing, aimlessly seeking redemption.

[Matt Hlinak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Throughout my formal writing training, I have studied the works of successful authors, based on the idea that I can find something useful in those works to apply to my own writing. It is impossible to quantify the extent to which my reading has influenced my writing, but I have not, with one exception, self-consciously tried to emulate another writer. In my one imitation experiment, I struggled with the decision of how closely to hew to the source material. After all, I wanted to write an homage, not a parody. In addition to the story I was imitating, it would have been helpful for me to have found a model imitation story like “Father, Lover, Deadman, Dreamer,” Melanie Rae Thon’s homage to Andre DuBus’ “A Father’s Story.”

Thon strikes the right balance between imitation and innovation. Structurally speaking, her story, like “A Father’s Story,” is a first-person, confessional account of a person connected with a tragedy. Like DuBus, Thon uses this tragedy as a pivotal moment around which to tell her narrator’s life story. Both stories focus on a relationship between a father and daughter that is forever altered when the daughter kills a man in a hit-and-run accident and the father helps her cover it up.

The most obvious way in which Thon works with DuBus’ ideas while making them her own is by telling her story from the daughter’s perspective. This change ensures that even though the basic plot is the same, the story itself is unique. The emotions and motivations of a father abetting his daughter’s crime are of course quite different than those of the daughter who is truly at fault. But on a deeper level, the archetypal daughter and the archetypal father are farthest apart in terms of nuclear family dynamics in that they share neither gender nor age. The father in both stories is driven by a (literally) paternalistic desire to protect his daughter, but only Thon’s story addresses how that paternalism impacts its recipient.

In addition to the anchoring plot device of the accident and cover-up, Thon borrows a number of themes from DuBus. Perhaps the most important theme from DuBus’ story is the Christian notions of atonement and absolution, which the pious father specifically rejects to protect his daughter. Ada similarly struggles with her faith, but hers is a very different faith from (and much less significant to her daily life than) that of Luke Ripley. In the end, she concludes, “I don’t believe confessions to God can save the soul or raise the dead.” Thon wisely decides not to imitate DuBus’ closing dialogue between the narrator and God, which is so distinctive to “A Father’s Story” that she might cross over into parody, but still ends by addressing the religious issues raised in both stories.

While Thon works with themes from DuBus’ story, one of her most important themes is absent from “A Father’s Story.” Much of the action in “Father, Lover, Deadman, Dreamer” is driven by the characters’ position on the border between white culture and Native American culture. Ada and her family are white, but they live in close proximity to Native American society. Ada’s mother runs off with a Native American man (or men), while Ada’s night on the reservation leads to her drunk-driving accident on the way home. This racial dynamic is Thon’s invention and helps establish her story independently of “A Father’s Story.” In this way, she is not so much imitating DuBus as building upon him.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enchanting, disgusting, beautiful stories about life and death among losers and thieves, drug addicts, the ostracised, the poor and the ordinary. But the writing is far from ordinary. My initial enthusiasm was dampened about half way through because the very richness that was so appealing began to lie a little heavy, like a taster meal at a top (read expensive) restaurant. You longed for a plain potato/ a Carver-esque sentence or two. However along would come something to take your breath away even when the story became opaque and the characters transparent (fading out of the narrative). Here's a sample:

We slid across the polished wooden floor of your living room, spun in the white lights of the twinkling tree. And, again, I tell you, I swear I felt the exact size and shape of things inside me, heart and kidney, my sweet left lung. All the angels hanging from the branches opened their glass mouths, stunned.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore Melanie Rae Thon, and her stories contain the empathy and spirituality of her character. The language and heart in these stories is beautiful. Each story delves into the mind and soul of the characters.
I read these stories slowly, one at a time, and I recommend that method. These stories are meant to be savored.

[Tahryah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I definitely recommend this to anyone who loves short stories. I had to read this book for a fiction crafting class, and all of the selected stories were nothing short of amazing. Melanie Rae Thon has a knack for capturing situations and people and making them real to the reader. All of the short stories were compelling and worthy of being analyzed, and are all stories I will definitely be rereading in the future.

[Braeden Udy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thon is crazy talented. But her work is so dense and dark, it’s a little overwhelming to read in a full collection like this.

[RoJo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too New Age-y and spiritual for me to understand. I may have missed the point

[Jen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow. I mean, if authors write what they know, then I feel really sorry for Melanie Rae Thon. I've never read anything of hers before and I thought this collection of short stories sounded interesting from the descriptions on Goodreads. Unfortunately, I was sadly disappointed.

I'm not one who generally enjoys dark, potent, heavy dramas. That's all this author seems to know how to write. I really wanted to like these stories, and I wanted to understand the characters and empathize with them but I was so blasted with the grossly overt sexual nature of EVERY story that I couldn't get past it. Seriously, all of her selected previous stories were about young people who were sexually abused and socially discarded. Every person identified with her abuser and felt made references to feeling out of touch with body and society. All of the characters, on some level, sought out the abuse as a way to cope with the rest of their daily lives. EVERY ONE. I understand having a theme, but if every short story you write is going to be the exact same (subbing the place and gender of the abuser) then I think you need some more life experiences.

Her two new stories were better though I didn't connect with them at all. It felt like someone told her exactly what I just wrote, so she attempted to diversify her story-telling and came up with lackluster and under-developed characters and plots. I myself am not an author, but I think there is a way to gut-impact your audience without resorting to repeated sexual depravities and descriptions. She tried, and sadly, she failed.

I understand connecting with the darker side of life, because that's what these stories are, and making a meaningful and poetic point about the transience of life, but it should be done well, with the experience playing a role, not being the center of the whole story. I think there's a way to use the raw nature of sexual abuse to develop a character but in her stories, I couldn't get past the actual act, leading me to feel cut off from the point I think the author wanted to make. Sad.

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Melanie Rae Thon's new short story collection explores the themes of love, guilt, grief, and redemption. Thon's brilliant lyrical prose transcends the gritty mundane into spiritual timelessness. Most of these stories are old favorites gathered into one volume. There are, however, a few new gems which I devoured.

In the short story, "Confessions of Raymond Good Bird," Thon's use of word choice paints a portrait of a man delivered from his earthly sins to eternal life in love. Thon describes Raymond's scarred face as "a face to love: without love, there was no way to look at you." When Raymond returns home after a twenty-two year absence, Thon describes the homecoming as "a song inside you." The family rejoices like the Biblical father in the tale of the prodigal son. No matter how many people Raymond killed during the Vietnam War, he was forgiven for "blessed was the God who hears, who had kept you alive and sustained you and delivered you whole to this moment." When Raymond dies, his soul is delivered not to Hell but into the arms of the Vietnamese mother whom he killed during the war. This Vietnamese mother becomes "the mother of God." In her arms, both she and Raymond find "only comfort." That is true deliverance.

[Zuzana · Rating 2 out of 5]

I won this book in a FirstReads giveaway.
The author is certainly talented, and the quality of the writing is very good. However, the content of the stories is dark to the point of making you almost physically nauseated, and seems to go along the lines of, "What else can go wrong in people's lives? Let's add that in, too." I suppose if I found pleasure in the depressing, I would have really enjoyed this book. As it is, though, I mostly enjoyed the last story - maybe because by then I had come to expect gloomy and sad.

[Nychola · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a book of short stories. Sounded like it would be interesting. I think the first story set the tone for my expectations which was subpar. I dont really get the point of the first story. The way this particular author writes annoyed me though i can't quite put my finger on the reason why. Maybe i just felt too many stories felt pointless..maybe i missed the reasoning somehow.

[Robbins Library · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each story is amazingly well-crafted and the subject matter is pretty dark. My inclination upon finishing was to immediately go back and read all the stories again because I think I could have gotten more out of them, but as always I have a huge pile of other books on desk. I highly recommend In This Light to anyone who appreciates good writing. Very strong collection!

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review is here.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book of wonderfully written short stories. Enjoyed each one.

[Kim Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

So many beautiful stories written over the years.

[Patricia Geller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stories from all her collections and some new ones. She is a fabulous writer. I would just go back and get her earlier books.

[Luann Schindler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a rare collection of stories. Wish there were more "new" stories.