flooded the room. Everywhere in this house, Megan understood, were her own prints, like a potter's hands on clay. Even if her touch was forgotten, it became imprinted. Everyone's did. Now distracted, now intent, they all went on shaping by sun and dusk what never seemed quite ready for the kiln. (255)

There can be nothing more profoundly disturbing than Michael Fillerup's "The Renovation of Marsha Fletcher." Marsha finds no solace for a philandering husband in her desperate attempts at the cosmetic reconstruction of her decaying body until our last glimpse of her shows her driving towardand we may assume intothe sea (39-53). And nothing more chilling than John Bennion's "Dust," fittingly set in Skull Valley, in which the disintegration of a marriage finds its metaphor writ large inthe impending doom of the chemical experiments being carried out at the testing grounds in the desert. Equally doomladen, but in the quiet way in which hearts can break, is Bennion's "The Interview," about a returned missionary about to be married wrestling with the knowledge of his homosexuality and confessing to a sorrowing priesthood counselor, who is as helpless as he is sympathetic (1-14, 27-41).

Levi Peterson's The Canyons of Grace gives us troubled episodes in the lives of otherwise ordinary people with stunning effect. The titles of the six stories in the collection, all metaphors of religious experience, suggest profound transformations: "The Confessions of Augustine," "Trinity," "Road to Damascus," "The Shriveprice," "The Christianizing of Coburn Heights,"

"The Canyons of Grace." Together they form more than a verbal design. They