Böcker av Lucia Bartlett

In her new collection of stories, author Lucia Bartlett presents three tales that explore unexpected and strange departures from normal life.The Vampire Squid continues a tale of the residents of Foster Lake. Fall, 2019 has families going about their business in the small northern Maine town when odd sightings are reported at the woman's prison. Then in March 2020, days before Covid lock-down, The Lane School takes a field trip to a new underground military facility that leaves teachers & students with unsettling impressions. When the women's prison raises the alarm; children are in danger, it's up to Anne Stevens to find out the truth.Set in year 2030, "e;Papercuts"e; follows twenty-three-year-old Wesley, a warehouse supervisor who yearns to become a CERT; part of the executive team. He obeys their orders but is manipulated into disaster when a beautiful coworker seduces him. The ultimate cost may be his sanity-or his life."e;The Community,"e; goes back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when epidemic suicide hits an upper middle class housing development and explores the possibility that expectations of perfect family life may not be healthy.

Maine, like much of the United States, is in the midst of an opioid crisis. It arrives in northern Maine around the same time as the MacPhees, and is verging on disaster by their second year of residence.After a brush with oxycodone, forty-two-year-old Nigel MacPhee, a married father of four, sets off on a path to remake himself, opening gallery and antique store in Foster Lake and using his God-given talents for mental healing on others, including his mother, Meg. Like her dad, thirteen-year-old Ada only wants to help. She''s involved with the therapeutic riding program created by their neighbors, Dan and Anne Stevens, while her siblings-Bette, Jeff, and Henry-are having their own adventures in the otherwise dull northern Maine countryside. Then there are unforeseen consequences when Nigel''s gallery business picks up and he sells a puzzle box to his old friend Henry Hobbs, who fled heavily taxed Maine for tax-free New Hampshire. It seems there are men spying on the MacPhees-and Nigel may have gotten involved in something way out of his depth.In this novel, a family transplanted to northern Maine in the midst of the opioid crisis begins to settle in, only to find themselves encountering unexpected danger.