Saturday Review: “They’re Doing Everything They Can, Everything They Know To Do” a review by Heather Bell Adams in NCLR Online Spring 2024 of Meagan Lucas’ story collection Here in the Dark (2023)
Meagan Lucas’ Here in the Dark “brings to life women who are trying desperately to save anything that is salvageable.” Adams quotes directly from eight of the sixteen short stories gathered in the collection.
Adams writes, “In these stories, Lucas pulls no punches. She is not afraid to delve into the gritty motivations of desperate criminals or probe the dark underbelly of modern society. Her protagonists, who
range from law enforcement officials to prisoners, have at least one thing in common: they are women in difficult circumstances trying to do the best they can with the hand they’ve been dealt.” From addiction to poverty to abuse, Lucas covers everything besetting Appalachia today. Adams notes, “To put Here in the Dark in a larger context, Lucas is doing with the short story form what North Carolina author David Joy
does in his novels, particularly When These Mountains Burn (2020).”
Read the entire review in the Online Spring 2024 issue out now! And order the book from Bookshop.org.
