"The Maid's Version," by Daniel Woodrell, and More Illustration by John Gall THE MAID'S VERSION By Daniel Woodrell Little, Brown, $25. Woodrell's exquisite ninth novel recounts the tragic tale of a fiery 1929 explosion at the Arbor Dance Hall in the small town of West Table, Mo. Forty-two dancers died, and the arsonist was never caught. The narrator, Alek Dunahew, revisits this long-ago devastation after spending a summer with his eccentric grandmother, Alma DeGeer Dunahew, who tells him her version as they wander through the local cemetery and talk over dinners of chicken livers and corn pone: "We'd eat together in her snug quarters, an early supper, always, elbow to elbow, watching squares of sunlight lose their shape along the walls, and return to the unending topic while forks clicked on her best plates, "What'd you learn today, Alek, and what use will you make of it?" " What Alek learns is mostly about his great-aunt Ruby, who died that night, and about the other accounts and rumors that have circulated over the years. Through Alma's memories and Alek's retelling, Woodrell constructs an expansive canvas of West Table and its surroundings in this rural corner of the Ozarks - Woodrell's Yoknapatawpha, which most recently lent its harsh beauty to the story collection "The Outlaw Album" (2011) and the novel "Winter's Bone" (2006). In "The Maid's Version," Woodrell orchestrates a captivating, almost operatic narrative of how tragedy and grief can transform places and people. "There were regulars in grief and tourist connoisseurs of the tragic and regulars again," he writes of the visitors who continue to arrive at the dance-hall site weeks after the explosion. Some knelt in prayer, some recounted news of their day on this earth in an intimate babble of words directed to the crater, and others stood at the edge and gazed upward, seeking a flashed revelation in the twilight. With an economical brilliance similar to that of Denis Johnson in "Train Dreams," Woodrell delivers a stunning story of one small town, and all of its profound complexities and opaque mysteries. It's a considerable achievement, and a pleasure to read. RIVERS By Michael Farris Smith Simon & Schuster, $25. In the haunted Gulf Coast region of this debut novel, hurricane season never relents. Almost every day and night, dark clouds gather, lightning cracks and rain pounds, washing away any semblance of civilized society - particularly south of "the Line," a no man's land drawn by the government. Out of these stark circumstances a kind of dystopian reality rises up, largely driven by survival, grief, hunger and redemption. Moving among third-person perspectives, the well-paced narrative charts the journey of Cohen, a young man who has lost his beloved wife and their unborn daughter during an evacuation. In flashbacks Smith traces the couple's idyllic courtship and marriage, as well as a trip they once took to Venice. Set against the present-tense narrative of disaster and danger, these fleeting glimpses offer faint apparitions of the "old normal." "Always felt like somebody was watching him when he made his way through one of these ghost towns," Smith writes as Cohen hunts for supplies at the novel's outset. There was a beautiful sadness to it all that he couldn't explain. It was a sentiment he had tried to ignore, but it had seeped into him and remained, some kind of grave nostalgia for the catastrophes and the way of life that once had been. After his home is ransacked and treasured mementos stolen, Cohen encounters "a ragtag band of refugees" who live in dilapidated trailers. Their charismatic leader, known for his fortunetelling and his mystical powers with snakes, is a cultlike figure who abuses the women and children around him - among them a headstrong woman, Mariposa, and two young brothers, Evan and Brisco, who bring unexpected moments of tenderness amid the weather-ravaged landscape of loss. Combined with Smith's incantatory prose, their adventures and will for survival propel this apocalyptic narrative at a compelling clip until the very last page. FORT STARLIGHT By Claudia Zuluaga Engine Books, paper, $14.95. S. Kirk Walsh's reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times. She lives in Texas.