[In the following review, Schwartz expresses disappointment with the ending of Phillips's Shelter and complains, “Somehow the mythic quality of the story and the accumulation of heavily weighted symbols, of snakes, caves, angels and devils, seem a pesky shorthand and detraction from Phillips's otherwise supple storytelling.”]

For Jayne Anne Phillips, tragedy and loss are endemic to American families, as persistent and insidious as cancer and as ordinary as groceries. She stalks generations of small-town West Virginia families through wars, affairs, economic crises and abuse and finds inside their heads a loose weave of memory, dreams and sensations periodically torn asunder by horror and death. Her fiction is keenly observed, her details razor-sharp, her dreams triple-cream rich; even if her dazzling skills fade in the reader's memory, a sense of melancholy lingers. Children grow, generations fall away, and underneath the passage of time she finds an organic, fundamental sorrow. Jean, the mother in Phillips's first novel, Machine Dreams, exists in a hazy state where the days run together unless they are punctuated by pain: “Anniversaries: Maybe she just remembered death instead of life. That was bad. But death wouldn't let you forget, would it? Life did; life let you go on for long weeks and never think at all. You just lived, nothing was wrong; those weren't bad times.”

Children aren't spared as witnesses to loss and isolation. Phillips's children seem closely related to Carson McCullers's Mick in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Frankie in The Member of the Wedding: confused, lonely, struggling to temper a barrage of information and emotions with only the crudest of skills. They are slightly grotesque, clumsily chasing their half-formed desires and attempting to outrun their fears. Like McCullers, Phillips goes straight and true into their hearts and illuminates how children make sense of what they can.

Phillips is occasionally plugged as a descendant of the Southern literary royals Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. She does share their strong sense of place and textured language, and especially O'Connor's love of outcasts, if not her acidity. But Phillips is decidedly contemporary, and notable among her peers because she pairs her realism with such thick sensory detail, in a tightly controlled investigation of the power of memory and dreams to replace what the years steal away.

Her first book, a short-story collection titled Black Tickets, supplied a brilliant, if occasionally overwrought, catalogue of characters: young junkies, a prostitute with a fondness for high school boys, a young man caring for his dying sugar daddy. Lots of lines. “Jamaica Delila, how I want you; your smell a clean yeast, a high white yogurt of the soul.” Teenage couples leaving a movie-theater balcony after the show: “Mouths swollen and ripe, they drifted down like a sigh of steam.”

In Machine Dreams, Phillips captured with great sensitivity the losses of three generations of a family living in a small West Virginia town as they move through two wars and the dissolution of a marriage. It sounds like a pulpy epic saga, yet the book is not “about” its own events, but rather what sorrow slips between or filters down from generation to generation, what happens to the experiences and memories that cannot be passed along. Beginning in the 1930s and running through the Vietnam War, Phillips establishes the country's thrill in progress and the price it exacts on its citizens. The red Pegasus logo at the local gas station is a recurrent image, magical, winged, riderless:

Danner and Billy are walking in the deep dark forest. Billy makes airplane sounds. Danner, oblivious to her brother's play, is stalking the magic horse. There are no cloven tracks, but the dust on the path is disturbed and the horse seems to be circling. Occasionally Danner looks over her shoulder and sees the animal watching them through thick leaves. The mare's eyes are large and certain. Certain of what? Billy pays no attention and seems to have followed his sister here almost accidentally. They walk on, and finally it is so dark that Danner can't see Billy at all. She can only hear him, farther and farther behind her, imitating with a careful and private energy the engine sounds of a plane that is going down. War-movie sounds. Eeee-yoww, ach-ack-ack. So gentle it sounds like a song, and the song goes on softly as the plane falls, year after year, to earth.

Many of the details of family life and pieces of characters established in Machine Dreams are carried over into Shelter, Phillips's latest novel. Geographically the two take place very close to one another; but while Machine Dreams situated itself firmly in the reality of day-today small-town life, Shelter unfolds in the murky dreamworld of an isolated girls camp tucked in the mountains. Phillips takes the realism of Machine Dreams wider afield, to explore the momentarily contained lives of four young girls (Lenny, Cap, Alma and Delia), a little boy and a religious fanatic. She seals her characters off from the outside world, effectively creating a pressure cooker, and lets us listen to what roars in their heads. Inside the minds of these children, family secrets curl in the heat, while outside, and close by, evil becomes embodied in the green mountains and cold waterways of their new home. Danger in Machine Dreams hovers in the form of war and disease; in Shelter it comes quite literally in the form of the devil.

Set in July 1963 at Camp Shelter, the story spins out slowly and suspensefully, at an almost dangerously languid pace. The prologue plunges us into the summer: “The quarters wavering in bottled heat, cots lined up in the big dark rooms that are pitch black if you walk in out of the sun. Black, quiet, empty, and the screen door banging shut three times behind you.”

Phillips dips us alternately into the minds of her young characters, full of secrets they have never shared. We meet four Girl Guide campers: Lenny, age 14, is pestered by haunting memories of loneliness and molestation she can barely bring to a focus. Her best friend, Cap, a funny, sassy rich girl neglected by her father and abandoned by her mother, clings to Lenny and pushes her, quite literally, to realize her sexual awakening. Alma, a bookwormy 11-year-old, comes to camp weighted with the knowledge of her mother's affair with the father of her best friend, Delia, and ruled by the urge to protect Delia from this knowledge as she stumbles through the day and sleepwalks through the night in the wake of her father's suicide. And then there's 8-year-old Buddy, son of the camp cook and Carmody, who is a cruel ex-con. Phillips is especially good at evoking the cocooned feeling of youth:

Mam had sayings she'd taught him [Buddy] … sing-songs, she called them, and he liked the one about the woods that had trees, and a lot of soft dark with nothing but wind, because he thought the words at night when he was safe, or he was safe when Mam told him the words: Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen. Rushy glen was like the name of a town or a road, a fork of some road that twisted back through the country, and Arey's Feed Store was the big wooden store near the train tracks in Gaither.

Running scared from the book's beginning, Buddy seeks sanctuary in the woods he knows by heart, or he tags along with Lenny and Cap. Slowly and horribly we learn what this shining, no-see-'um boy must escape: the sadistic taunts and abuse of his alcoholic father.

From the start this hot sleepiness is foreboding, evocative of both the jungles of Vietnam and the overripe heat that signals Southern Gothicism Ahead. (It's just before escalation in Vietnam, and though the war is never mentioned, you can feel it lurking.) The girls marching down trails in their rumpled cotton uniforms seem vulnerable to just about everything. While the camp forces them to focus on schedules, clipboards, flag formations and the dangers of Communism, dark family memories boil over. Bats flap, half-seen, through the night. “The shadows rose higher and took form, scraps of black paper, shaken angrily, gaining the air in spasms,” and the forest itself teems with unseen life and secrets. “The dew-slick windings that were the trails from Highest were a jungle unto themselves and smelled of melons and snakes.”

Of course, if fruits and snakes are about, the devil cannot be far behind. No sooner is evil introduced than we meet Parson, a drifter and seer who works near the camp, his head swollen with the fire-and-brimstone visions of fundamentalist Christianity. “Parson felt himself empowered as a warrior of the Lord, free to suck at the marrow of the Devil's sated bones.” Escaped from prison, this raving angel has come to Camp Shelter in search of grace and bent on beating the devil that lives within his old cellmate Carmody. Parson's visions are captivating, if sometimes a little inscrutable, and his memories of a miserable childhood spent shuttling between foster homes round out the cast of characters as all somehow damaged goods who know too much about their surroundings and caretakers and too little about paths of escape.

While it's inevitable from the start that the four girls and Buddy are headed for a terrible collision with the two lunatic men, the story unfolds with sinister slowness. An omniscient narrator looks out from four points of view, those of Alma, Lenny, Buddy and Parson; progress is further checked by the lushness of Phillips's language, which you can't help but sink into as if it were a field of poppies. “Buddy can taste the night in his mouth like a wish, a night so big, so warm and wet and full of air, falling away forever like the sky falls with its stars.”

The book builds to a fever pitch and its climax is visceral and terrifying. That aside, though, it's hard to know what to take from Shelter. While the book is full of characters with histories long and complex enough to make them seem solid, by its end such specificity is subsumed in the larger fable quality, by the big, plot-y issues of the war between good and evil and the girls' (cringe) fall from innocence. Somehow the mythic quality of the story and the accumulation of heavily weighted symbols, of snakes, caves, angels and devils, seem a pesky shorthand and a detraction from Phillips's otherwise supple storytelling.

So much is at work and works well outside of these tropes that it's hard to know why it was traded away for a horror movie/fairy tale ending—it's almost as if the girls have stumbled into the wrong story, out of something open-ended and into something pat. When the drama has died down, it's clear that the campers have learned something more subtle than the plot lets on, something about storytelling itself: the cost of shared knowledge, the pitfalls of using language to record memory, the way stories can shackle us in time. Their shock at the new knowledge is conveyed by Phillips's characteristic grace and ear for teen-speak. “‘It's over now,’ Lenny said slowly, evenly. ‘But if we tell someone, it'll never be over. We'll have to tell it and tell it. We'll never be able to stop telling it. Nothing else will matter anymore, ever.’” But after the denouement, we scarcely see the girls before the last page is turned. The narrative tidily establishes them as safe from evil (Buddy even gets postcards from Lenny and Cap), and we are thrust out of the dreamworld and sent blinking into the light of day.

Yet, I wanted an extraordinary ending from this rapturous writer, a myth of her own making. A coming of age can be made to swell in the reader's mind by imbuing it with a mythic quality, but once it's structured and named as such (as this one certainly is), the import of the journey is heavily freighted. What happens to people once the plot spins out, once the battle between good and evil has been waged? Phillips seems to be searching here for something outside of time and place, the usual anchors of her work, investigating the possibility of universal forces that shoot through people and nature. Her fiction has long been concerned with timeless qualities, of course—sorrow, love and loss—but always as molded by very specific historical, personal and political forces. One hopes that this is as far away from her lodestar as she will stray, that she will continue to remind us, as she does when at her best, that there is no “shelter” in life. Or, as she says for Lenny, “The world would not be as it was. She saw that there was no world but this one now, full blown and dense with shifting air; they were born into it, mourning.”