"Love, marriage, obligation—fealty, a word one 
character slaps down in a game of Scrabble only to have 
her husband challenge it—are ideals here. Real lives are 
full of dark instincts, lost last chances, chaotic half-
reconciliations. In the midst of this unraveling, family
ties loosened and tangled, Scott Blackwood traces the line 
of connection that do endure. With starkly poetic language,
scenes of bleak comedy and insistent longing, its clear-eyed
appraisals of who to blame then forgive, In the Shadow of
Our House is one of the best first collections I've 
read."-Debra Monroe.

In Scott Blackwood's debut collection of thematically linked
stories, people live on the cusp of the past and present,
saddled with the knowledge that "sometimes what you're 
thinking can't be dovetailed with what you do."

Set in Austin, Texas, the nine stories are told in spare
language freighted with a sense of loss and dread, 
responsibility and fate. The characters in Blackwood's
narratives face the result of the irrevocable choice they've
made, accept their losses, and attempt to forge something
meaningful out of what remains of their frayed connections
to one another.

In "Alias, a man grapples with the decision to kidnap his
step-daughter's child and raise her himself. During a medical
crisis, a woman in "New Years" is forced to confront her
growing estrangement from her teenage son and comfort her
ex-husband's lover. In "Worry," a fifteen-year-old faces his
father's infidelity and his own darkening vision of himself
and the world around him. And in the title story, neighbors
ponder what, if anything, they can do about the disappearance
from their midst of Odie Dodd, an aging physician who witnessed
the Jonestown mass suicide in Guyana.

The moments Blackwood takes his stories to are small and quiet,
but they contain whole worlds with wisdom coming at you--slow,
certain, indelible.
_________________________________________________________

SCOTT BLACKWOOD is coordinator of the Undergraduate Writing 
Center at the University of Texas at Austin and has had 
stories published in such journals as the Boston Review, 
Whetstone, Gulf Coast, and Other Voices. He's 
currently working on a novel in stories about the stirrings 
of fate and chance in the lives of Odie Dodd and his 
neighbors.  Blackwood lives with his wife and daughter in 
the hills on Austin's outskirts where Tonkawa Indians once 
roamed. His diatant relative William Blackwood founded 
Blackwood's Magazine, which first published Joseph 
Conrad's Heart of Darkness in 1899.  


What people are saying about this book

". . . For just as the act of reading this book disproves
the contention that words fail, the characters in it manage
to survive their losses. They carry on, perhaps destructively
or self-destructively, and they never entirely succumb, are
never frozen in despair. As Darnell says, 'For the most part,
I think we do the best we can, with uneven results.' 
     "Darnell's modest claim for our human strivings, though
humbling, is right on the mark, as are these acute and
nimble stories."—Julie Gray, New York Times