DAYS WHEN THE HOUSE WAS TOO SMALL

A short novel and a handful of stories or rather conversations set in the remote, wintry Adirondacks and they're as lifelike and sad to say lifeless as those days when the house becomes too small. Particularly for Mory, the seventeen year old son of Hilda and Fred Macken -- caretakers of a summer camp -- Mory who has been badly burned and lost almost all of his sight due to the carelessness of his stepfather. With the messy clutter of neglect and shiftlessness all around him, and the constant television, Mory is ""alive to many other places and quite dead to where he was"" -- until the second deliberate tragedy when he picks up a gun. The stories, some reducing to only a page or two, are random, flat discussions re sex or giving up cigarettes or old age -- taking place in bars or cars. Andrus is perhaps a too faithful recorder and honesty is not enough however sincerely and genuinely he has caught the dead level of this kind of existence and ""the way snow feels when you're already wet.