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Upstate love

Love with its needs and heartaches burrows through Sam Howie’s “Rapture Practice” (Main Street Rag: Charlotte; 124 pages, $12.95 paper).

The collection of ten stories offers a variety characters. They live in Upstate South Carolina: a drunk, an economist, a tow-truck driver, a counselor, prostitutes, a fiddle player and children. They share a common denominator – they’re all hurting.

Howie lives in the Upstate, too. (I can’t resist Upstate. The names South Carolinians give the regions of their dreary state kill me: Lowcountry? Midlands? Those translate as swamp and out-of-the-swamp.) He’s an instructor at Converse College and teaches in the writing center. He’s published fiction and nonfiction in Shenandoah, The Writer’s Chronicle, Potomac Review and other places.

These stories are ambitious in their intent, and Howie appears comfortable taking risks with his storylines. The title story, “Rapture Practice,” is set in an orphanage for boys. The narrator is a counselor who pulls the night shift. The boys, preteens, report monsters outside their windows. The narrator, flashlight in hand, dutifully investigates and reports back to them. The narrator is saddled with the monster of loneliness, too, as well as the elderly groundsman at the orphanage.

The story, though, falls short of the high mark Howie set for it. It seems to me that here, and throughout the collection, there’s a heavy handedness. It’s a lack of restraint -- too much is spelled out. It gives the stories a weighty tone.

This going over the top affects the sentences, too. They feel heavy, rather than clean and sharp. This blunts the emotional impact of the stories, time after time.

Unless I’ve misread his story, “The End of Summer,” the narrator is a preteen girl in pigtails. If there’s a passage early on saying this is from the perspective of an adult, I read over it. This kid talks like an adult, not a little girl. She speaks of the percussive sounds of crickets. If she’s in an accelerated class at school, we have no way of knowing that.

But there’s attitude here, and hard-headed looks at the Upstate (hehe), always a plus.
 

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