rev. of The King of Limbo by Adrianne Harun
by
The King of Limbo
Stories by Adrianne Harun. Mariner, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Don Lee.
The ten stories in Harun's first collection,
The King of Limbo, tend toward the elliptical -- tinged with mystery and occasionally fable, populated by loners who are estranged from loved ones. Haunted, grieving, the characters fitfully reach for solace, sometimes to precarious effect: a woman who loses her newborn baby crashes her car into an elderly couple's home; another woman's husband, a divinity student, plays Good Samaritan one too many times and exposes them to a serial killer; a reclusive widower writes a series of letters to a faraway newspaper, pretending to be a former resident, and becomes the town celebrity.
Harun's prose is lyrical, and she has a particular gift for piquant description, able to sum up a character with a single line, evidenced, for example, by the sixteen-year-old girl who possesses "the pink rheumy eyes and frail blondness of an old woman on her way to bone and ash."