Hagy’s tales are set in and around Laramie, where the author lives, and mostly in the present, with a few dips into the 19th century. Her characters are bound by geography, a certain independence of temperament, and the ghosts who haunt them, both figuratively and literally.
In “Border,’’ a young man on the run is given up by an apparently sympathetic stranger - and revealed to have left a body in his wake. In “The Little Saint of Hoodoo Mountain,’’ an adolescent ranch girl displaces a child’s bones, with consequences that threaten her family from all sides. In the goofiest and least successful of the stories, “Superstitions of the Indians,’’ a slacker grad student with a fondness for Counting Crows and Frisbee golf is befriended by the ghost of a long-dead university librarian.
This last story strains credibility, not because of the supernatural apparition, which Hagy handles with ease, but because the author never fully inhabits the voice of the dude-bro narrator. The quiet ghost of “How Bitter the Weather,’’ on the other hand, fits seamlessly into the swirl of solitary souls around a more convincing character. Melanie, who is calm about the haunting of her tiny Laramie home, reports on her “small, ambivalent city’’ for the local paper, indifferently sleeps with old boyfriends and married men, and nurses addictions to espresso and diet pills. She is thrown by the disappearance of a man named Armand - of unspecified European background, dignified, alcoholic, poor, and a local fixture - who, with the ghost, forms a kind of matched set of symbolic absences. Like everyone in Melanie’s world, they are known and unknown, there and yet out of reach. Hagy paints a delicate, moving portrait of a protagonist terminally hungry for more than she can get, subsisting like the sparrows on a “regular diet of crumbs.’’
