shelter on the window ledge outside Janet’s office, members crowd one another, jockey for position, make room, fly off, return. Gerber offers no solutions, allows no cheap sentiment, gives no assurances that today’s truce will result in peace, but the family is affirmed. If that is “women’s writing,” then readers need more of it.

Failed or doomed relationships are dramatized in “Cleopatra Birds” and “Honeymoon” and suggested in “See Bonnie & Clyde Death Car.” In all three, the women characters betrayed by men absent even when physically present. In “Cleopatra Birds,” the husband, Davy, cares more about fishing and raising birds than for his wife. She, a student of African dance, eventually leaves with her African lover, buying Davy a pair of rare Cleopatra pheasantsa symbol of their mutual betrayal. “Honeymoon” is an emotionally complex study of a doomed marriagea young woman drawn to an older man by his maturity and confidence. From the beginning the reader perceives that Rand’s interest in Cheryl is sexual and monetary; she is his shill at the blackjack tables. His wedding gift to her is a pair of cheap “love light” earrings that, poignantly, do not show up in her “wedding photo,” a Polaroid taken of her alone by a young couple she meets on her solitary trip to Hoover Dam.

Gerber successfully portrays the emotional complexity of her narrators, using the tension in their voices, the fibs they tell themselves, and telling metaphors, objective correlatives of their inner condition. Lynn in “See Bonnie & Clyde Death Car” is typical. Having vowed never to visit Las Vegas again, she finds herself there with Phil, hoping the nickel slots will affirm her desperate pursuit of luck, that Phil will find happiness, that the two of them will always be together. Gerber skillfully builds tension as Lynn loses steadily at the slots, empathizes with the pathetic desperation of a woman who leaves her wedding ring on a machine and does not return to claim it, and hysterically panics over the loss of her own purse. At the story’s end, she and Phil admire Bonnie and Clyde’s carhe because they lived dangerously, she because they died together in love. Their fate is left trembling at the end of the story.

“Tell Me Your Secret” and “My Suicides” are not entirely successful, perhaps because they depart from the emotional territory Gerber understands most deeply. “Tell Me Your Secret” is set amid the in loco parentis days of 1950’s college life, when female students had strict curfews, and getting off campus overnight had to be arranged by lies. Against her better judgment, Fanny agrees to attend a party thrown by a faculty member, knowing that she is setting herself up for seduction. It is a defiant gesture, carried out despite the news of her grandmother’s death. Perhaps too predictably, the dangers the college warned her about become real. “My Suicides” details the four suicides in the narrator’s life, contrasting them a bit too obviously with the unsuccessful attempt by her aunt, which led only to a lingering death. Also obvious is the symbolism of a peahen and her chicks, apparently looking for the lost peacock. Intended as a symbol of the people abandoned by those who commit suicide, it is used too blatantly at the end.

The remaining four selections could be called horror stories but not in the Hollywood sense. These spring from the genuine terrors of life in the suburbs. “This Is a Voice from Your Past,” begins with a phone call from a former classmate, the talented Ricky, who, their creative writing teacher asserted, was a genius. The narrator (Janet again), has carved out a modest career as a writer, enough so that thirty years later Ricky imposes himself on offers of assistance, ruthlessly deceiving, lying, betraying, accusing, and finally threatening until his very absence is an ominous presence. Gerber skillfully guides readers through the steps of this evolving nightmare, leaving them, like Janet, in a state of paranoid suspense.

“I Don’t Believe This” opens with a macabre detail straight out of the news: Carol’s husband’s cremated remains had ended up a dumpster. The ashes she scattered could have belonged to anyone or anything, a fitting end for the ironically named Bard, whose life was a series of blunders, a bad joke that made him an abusive husband. Carol’s sister, the narrator, had been caught in the middle when Carol and the children fled to a shelter, and Bard called daily to try to cajole, intimidate, or charm information from the narrator regarding their whereabouts. When Bard finally makes good his suicide threats, he leaves his wife in guilt-ridden relief. The story ends as strangely as it began: Carol’s children use their father’s clothes to make a dummy they hang from a tree for their Halloween display.

“Night Stalker” plays on the fears a serial killer arouses in Sylvie, an assistant in a hospital’s leukemia research lab, who responds with cautionary maneuvers in response to news bulletins about the killer. She especially misses the dogs her husband took when they separated. At story’s end, she buys a basset pup, not just for herself but also to cheer a leukemia victim who visits her lab. Death stalks the story, but the ending is anticlimactic.

Nothing is anticlimactic in “Dogs Bark,” the most intense and horrific story in the collection. The narrator and her husband live next door to a family with three huge dogs that bark at the slightest provocation, or none at all, disturbing their academic lives, ruining sleep, destroying their love life, driving them to the edge of insanity. Gradually a war between the neighbors rises in pitch and intensity; attempts at understanding and compromise lead nowhere. The police are called, to no avail, for the law offers more protection to the dogs’ owners than to the aggrieved neighbors, and reconciliation becomes impossible as a legal case waits in limbo and the narrator becomes increasingly frantic. Finally, resolution seems possible when the case comes to court, but the dog owners are fined a paltry one hundred dollars, and nothing in the settlement quiets the dogs or ends the other torturesblaring radios, a demoniac sprinkler, the disappearance of the narrator’s catsthat the dog owners inflict. In desperation, the couple takes matters into their own hands and poison the dogs, but after a two months of blissful peace, the barking returns. The neighbors have bought a huge, slavering mastiff.

This story is bone-chilling in its ever-rising tension. The reader feels the anger, frustration, injustice, and looming insanity that the characters experience. The smooth-talking neighbor becomes a demoniac figure, shmoozing the police, pretending to be reasonable, feigning reconciliation. Is he? Does the story have another side? Are the narrator and her husband the crazy ones, unreasonable in their expectations of quiet, unable to ignore a din that seems to bother no one else? The ambiguity of the situation, the incrementally rising tensions, the near hysteria that the narrator feels as the situation spins increasingly out of control create heart-pounding anxiety in the reader. Throughout, the “law is an ass,” fueling the couple’s rage and playing on the reader’s suspicion that to become involved with the police and judiciary is to enter a Kafkaesque world of nightmare and hallucination. If anything, Gerber’s irrational world is more real that Franz Kafka’s bizarre allegories, for it springs not from a fevered imagination but from the suburban world known too well.

Here, then are thirteen stories to command a reader’s attention and respect. Not all are of the highest quality, and four are reprints from previous collections, even though this is not a “best of” collection. This book is enjoyable not for its literary experiments or flashy technique but for its good, solid writing, flashes of metaphorical brilliance, and insights into the ordinary lives most of people live. Frank O’Connor’s dictum that the short story deals with those on the margins of society is here proven inadequate. Normal lives, too, have their dramas, and Merrill Joan Gerber is their poet.