WORDS ARE MAGIC

Tuft, a retired Presbyterian minister and mental health counselor, blends fantasy and reality in an eclectic short story collection.

These tales introduce readers to a world of fantasy and biography through accounts of a wide range of characters, auspiciously intended for an audience of “human beans and other perishables.” The book features dozens of brief stories, each about a different person or situation, but all bound together through common themes of religion, health, or medicine; some share a common Pennsylvanian setting. Each ends with the phrase, “Words are magic, and writers are wizards”—an intriguing repetition that leads readers to contemplate that the stories are somehow interconnected; the phrase also ends the preface, which offers a bit more context on the sentences that follow: “I write because I have to, I cannot not write. Stories are in my blood.” The book’s greatest strength is Tuft’s rich, memorable imagery, as in “Sea of Lonely”: “The young boy clutches his father’s hand as he dodges the wheelchairs filled with wispy-haired gnomes who make feeble gestures as they reach to touch him.” The author’s vivid language allows readers to fully immerse themselves in the worlds he constructs or retells from his past, as in “Ginny,” a story about a 90-year-old-woman with dementia at an independent living facility where the author also resides. The weakest aspect of the collection is how it jumps around interrelated themes; at times, readers may find the stories to be a bit hard to follow and may puzzle over how a particular tale relates to others, such as “Johnny Smoke” and “The Black Mile,” which each feature very different experiences of a veteran of the Vietnam War, or “The Green Dot,” “Knights of Fantasia,” and “Plant a Sticker,” each of which centers on an image of someone reverently placing an object or mark on another person’s forehead. As such, readers may get the most out of these stories by approaching each as a unit rather than collectively, which makes their individual charms more apparent.

A set of colorfully written short works that seem to work best in isolation.