Some Kinds of Love: Stories (Juniper Prize for Fiction)

Sometimes the opposite of love is not hate, but depravity. In these twelve stories set in the Missouri Ozarks, New Orleans, and Mississippi, Steve Yates reveals lovers clawing back from precipices of destructiveness, obsessiveness, cruelty, vanity, or greed. They seek escape and yet find new barriers, realizing true love may not be at all what they imagined. Pioneers, limestone quarry owners, young German American Civil War survivors, bankers, sex toy catalog designers, highway engineers, Pakistani terrorists, attorneys, missile guidance masterminds, and furniture factory workers (who can see the future) populate these pieces. From the Ozarks of the 1830s, when locals perceive doomsday in a historic starfall, to the near future at an all-night slow-pitch softball tournament when Armageddon looms yet again, these stories chart the dark side of love, the ties that bind families, and the sweet complications of human desire.