Graveyard of the Atlantic, and Graveyard of the Atlantic

Book Author:Alyson Hagy

Publisher:Graywolf Press

Format:Paperback

Graveyard of the Atlantic

Graywolf Press, 190 pp., $14 (paper)

All but one of the stories in Alyson Hagy's collection are set in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, also known as the graveyard of the Atlantic, not only because of the hard living forced upon its inhabitants, but because the islands rise up like tombstones in the black and dangerous ocean. The people in Hagy's stories are fishermen (and women), haunted visitors, even members of the Coast Guard -- all of them trying to negotiate the pitfalls of daily life and the human heart. Hagy's prose, like Annie Proulx's, is flinty and tough, like many of her characters, and she depicts the coastal geography of the Outer Banks effectively. But it's the last story, "Search Bay," which is set on Lake Huron and not the Outer Banks, that is the best of the bunch. In it, a former merchant seaman and lapsed alcoholic hides out in his cabin, avoiding the outside world as much as he can, until a young Native American boy arrives to trap beavers on his property and forces the man to dredge up painful memories from his past. Here, Hagy's muscular prose weds with her acute characterization to create a work of rough-edged beauty.