rescuing an elderly woman from a knife-wielding assailant, he attacked her son, who was merely testing her hearing aid with a sonic wand.

Miles believes he can help Lex, too, but she is enamored of Haden McCrae, a nineteen>year-old inmate whom Miles dislikes but inadvertently endorses. Mounted on his cousin’s steed, Captain Marvel, Miles follows McCrae and Lex into the snowy woods, determined to rescue her. His resolve fails, and so his chivalric dreams collapse. The goddess, out of reach, attempts to reconcile with Miles, who has sunk into despair and will not see her. Oblivious to Miles’s plight, Lex returns to dialysis. Miles is discharged from his sentence, going to work in a museum of natural history near Albany. There, an unexpected visitor brings him to a shuddering realization, leaving him pondering the two-million-year-old skull of Paranthropus, an early hominid with a brain about 40 percent of the size of modern peoples’, a creature whose only source of promise was scavenging from other hominids. Lex, the fey goddess, dissolves into a prison camp dream, and the real answer to Miles’s self-questioning reside in the empty eye sockets of the ancient hollow skull.

If women are not present or are ultimately unavailable, then they may be invented, as LJ does in “Happy Fish, Plus Coin,” creating the horrifying Nancy to win the pity and friendship of Gay Isbelle, a wheelchair-bound, inspirational speaker with burns all over his body (except for his feet which are perfectly formed and golden). The imaginary Nancy is a devourer of men, abusive, sadistic, and unforgivingthe ideal creation for LJ, whose wealthy family members have been chasing and threatening him for months.

In “Dumpster Tuesday,” Max Miller has been emotionally devoured by Pearl, and he seeks vengeance on her and Dick Doyle, the catatonic country singer who stole Pearl away. Max follows the call of the siren from his New York office to the position of dumpster guard, speargun in hand, outside a Florida pawnshop, biding his time until he fulfills his spiteful mission, waiting impatiently in the arms of Joan, an innocent, beautiful bus driver who hardly suspects the torment and humiliation raging beneath Max’s surface. Wade, the hero of “Wreck,” bows to the sacred feminine he discovers in Grace, a Hollywood actress in hiding after reconstructive facial surgery. His eyes look far beyond the wreckage of her face into her soul, a soul doomed perhaps to destroy him once her beauty reappears.

It is in the title story, “Voodoo Heart,” that all manifestations of the goddess flow into one. Jacob seems to be a winner, a man who can make anything happen. He connects to the infinite within every woman he meets, only to spurn her and cast her away, inspiring her with mistrust and loathing of him. Jacob wonders all the time why he is doing this; perhaps he is so filled with the fear of parting with himself that he must kill the best he has in order to survive. He seeks resolution and self-understanding from the elderly woman serial killer in the plantation prison for wealthy women adjacent to the mansion Jacob has so lovingly restored with his girlfriend, Laura.

Indeed, “Voodoo Heart,” the centerpiece of Snyder’s collection, encapsulates the major concerns of his fiction. Laura, employed by an aquarium, and Jacob, manager of a wrecking yard, appear to have captured their bliss in the old mansion they have purchased deep in the Florida jungle. Together five years, they are deeply in love, but something is terribly wrong with Jacob. “I worry that one day soon I’ll break Laura’s heart,” he says. “And not by accident either. I’m afraid I’ll do it violently, bust her heart wide open. I’ve done it before. I’ve dated a woman, fallen in love, and then turned on her. I don’t know why.”

As the mansion extends its hold over Jacob, making him become secretive and distant from Laura, he becomes obsessed with the prison next door, voyeuristically spending hours studying the women and their movements through a telescope. He focuses on the elderly murderesses, particularly the serial killer Rose Deach. He likens these harmless-looking old women to brand-new cars brought to the wrecking yard by people desperate to be rid of them, cars they call Voodoos, vehicles in which loved ones may have committed suicide or hearts and promises may have been broken.

Such mysterious, apparently nonthreatening vehicles are cursed, and Rose and the other two killers remind Jacob of “Voodoos. Cars you know can’t really be that dangerous, but you avoid all the same.” As Jacob travels deeper into this heart of darkness in the Florida bush, he opens up areas of his soul that no one should explore, regions that torment him, that terrify Laura, and that ultimately bring them both to the cliff of annihilation.

The pacing of “Voodoo Heart” is extraordinary. The reader is seduced into a lazy, southern world of restaurants, aquariums, sprawling mansions, and a young couple realizing a dream suddenly turned nightmare, knocking them and the reader off balance, unable to turn their backs on this situation, no matter how high the price of remaining.

This yearning for connection, only to thwart or be thwarted, is perhaps best embodied in a song that reappears in the stories with a modern setting. “It’s Not Over Till It’s Over, Over” is a country ballad about a man and woman kept apart by their trucking jobs but who talk on the CB radio all the time, “just two lonely voices in the darkness.” They keep driving past each other’s trucks, unaware that they are barely missing each other, much like the couples who populate these stories. Whether together, estranged, or separated by natural or unnatural forces, they keep driving past each other’s symbolic trucks, seeking release, freedom, salvation, or anything that will bring them peace amid the chaos into which they have driven themselves.

There is, however, stability in the universe of Voodoo Heart, exemplary exceptions of steadfastness and strength, permanent anchors, voices of reason and reassurance who offer hope that the world is not as fragile and capricious as it may seem. Such characters include Dex in “Blue Yodel,” Pres’s “hook man,” responsible for hooking the barrels before they tumble over the falls, “pole across his thighs, feet planted at the rocky edge of the island.” Dex’s son Dennis had been killed in the Argonne Forest, and Dex has “that sad look to him, sitting there staring at the passing water all day.” Yet he carries on, holding up not only himself but also Pres and the dozens of potential suicides heading over the falls.

Here, Snyder tells the reader, is the capacity and will to endure all the twists and bitter turns of life: Lex’s father, Sargeant Brill of “About Face”; Gay Isbelle, burned and crippled mentor to LJ in “Happy Fish, Plus Coin”; Max’s patient and understanding boss, Roddy, in “Dumpster Tuesday”; and John’s widowed father, Rollie, in “The Star Attraction of 1919,” always by the phone to assure his barnstorming son that this world is a place where sorrow and tears can overwhelm the soul, but it does not mean one cannot go on, cannot endure, cannot make choices that will keep one centered and on the path to redemption.

Perhaps this possibility of redemption in a world gone mad is the ultimate realization of Snyder’s collection. In an existential universe, one is bound by the choices one makes, the actions one takes, and those decisions and deeds are caught in the flux of the resolutions of others and the boundaries of the environment one inhabits. Isolation, fear, loneliness, escape, alienation, desperation, and despair are the stuff of life, as are love, joy, fellowship, and hope, all paths leading to doom or rejuvenation. The world is fickle, these stories tell us, and so are people. Nothing is guaranteed, but as long as one does not capitulate, as long as one keeps chasing that blimp in the sky, as long as one seeks the beauty beneath the horror of the open wounds, as long as one can accept love and return it, there will always be an opportunity for redemption.