Last One Out Shut Off the Lights
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"A lightning bolt of a literary debut." ---Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize winner
"Enchanting and so neatly planed they feel made by time, these stories mark the debut of a writer to watch." ---John Freeman, Literary Hub
Last One Out Shut Off the Lights is an evocative portrait of the last-chance towns of southwest Louisiana, where oil development, industrial pollution, dying wetlands, and the ever-present threat of devastating hurricanes have eroded their inhabitants' sense of home. These eleven piercing stories feature indelible characters struggling to find a foothold in a world that is forever washing out from under them, people who must reckon with their ambivalence about belonging to a place so continually in flux.
In a collection whose resonant echoes abound, we meet a reluctant teenage mother who stows her baby in a closet to steal a night out; a spiteful retiree who sabotages his neighbor in the wake of a hurricane; a Pentecostal singer in a children's theater company who confronts the cultish leader of her troupe; a community of elderly Cajuns who conspire with a family of Sudanese immigrants to hide an escaped cow from the authorities; and a desperate young woman who tries to drag her brother to Mexico for surgery, determined to save his life and her own.
As Lauren Groff did for the state of Florida in her recent collection Florida, Stephanie Soileau demonstrates that Louisiana is as much a state of mind as it is a place on the map. A love letter to the Cajun language, life rhythms, and customs that still make the region unique, Last One Out Shut Off the Lights is also a powerful reminder of the treacherous escape routes that bedevil anyone longing to leave home, and the traps that remain for those who desire to return.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Soileau's vivid debut collection delves into snapshots of rough-hewn Louisianan lives, where harsh realities and callous personalities rule the day. In "The Whiskey Business" a high school girl is raped by a boy whose family wields their power to keep him from being prosecuted, and in "So This Is Permanence," a teenage mother hides her baby in a closet to sneak off with friends, riding in the bed of a pickup across swamps and canals; after this taste of freedom, "dumpsters and rivers started to look like good options." Other stories, such as "Cut Off, Louisiana: A Ghost Story" and "The Boucherie," highlight economic desperation in the wake of natural disasters, while "Mr A" tells of a children's theater director who takes advantage of a road trip to seduce a boy in the troupe. Many stories stand out with exceptional, sometimes poetic phrasing, such as "When Pluto Lost His Planetary Status" ("I have felt love just as profound and worshipful and inimitable and hopelessly banal"). Filled with dense disquietude, these tales portray lives that are wrung dry by relentless conflicts and challenges. The characters are markedly distinct among the stories, though they share in having little or no chance of joy, hope, or redemption. Soileau shines a memorable light on a lesser-seen slice of Louisiana.
