SUB ROSA AND OTHER STORIES

Lambert’s debut collection of short stories, set largely in Louisiana, focuses on characters searching for something more in their lives.

Dwayne, the protagonist of the opening story, “Blood in My Hair,” is serving a life sentence for unintentionally contributing to the death of a police officer; the prisoner, who’s known as “Cowboy,” spent much of his adulthood riding bulls in rodeos, has been craving a similarly perfect, adrenaline-filled moment ever since his incarceration began. In “Find Franny Now,” a woman named Lydia gave up on optimism after her autistic son was diagnosed with brain cancer and her husband subsequently left her; her general lack of hopefulness extends to Franny, the titular missing teenage girl, who Lydia believes has no chance of ever being found. In these tales, Lambert also deftly paints portrayals of people who long to find some kind of meaning in details of everyday life. For example, Miss Arnold, a newly hired nurse working the night shift at East Louisiana State Hospital in “Harold and Harold,” attempts to determine a profound reason for a patient’s obsession with the 1971 movie Harold and Maude. In “Lucinda,” the title character is happily married to a “Jungian analyst” but trying to move beyond emotional trauma caused by her mother; after a meditation workshop, she and her husband venture to the Ozarks for a vacation. In evocative, deeply human prose, which is characteristic of the collection as a whole, the author shows how Lucinda feels closer to freedom and her true self: “Embracing the mountain silence, she felt that there was something more out there. At home…she could sense it, like a slight tug. But up here…she felt its presence all around her.” Throughout these stories, Lambert successfully highlights the uncertainty people feel even as they hold out hope, and this results in a robust collection.

A moving, skillfully written set of tales.