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Home at Last. Chet Kozlowski. iUniverse. http://www.iuniverse.com. 260 pages; cloth, $25.95; paper, $15.95.


The wry title of Chet Kozlowski's stellar debut collection, Home at Last, provides an ironic theme that ties the stories together. As the cover art suggests, portraying bound statuary before dark grey clouds, these are not stories glowing with sunshine and sterling optimism. Further, as his preliminary allusion to Odysseus's torment by the Sirens signifies, being "home at last" may be but a writhing delusion. As the collection unfolds, Kozlowski destroys the typical associations of hearth and comfort as well as the emotional implications and connotations of "home." Only until the very final story does the title seem affirmative, that is, if the reader brings a positive frame of mind to the text.

Whether they intend it or not, Kozlowski's characters share a need to get home—to find a safe location in which to live ("Summer of Love"), to reconnect with estranged kin ("The Price of Ice"), or simply to feel at home within one's own skin ("I Am Screaming at the Top of My Lungs"). Quite often, this quest to find home is to discover what one truly wants. Kozlowski shows this in "Honey Bear," in which at the climax the protagonist reflects, "That's the point, isn't it? Brian thinks: What I want. I want. I want. I want." In "The Buck," Abby decides to speak to the police about her neighbor's nudist tendencies, which have been causing her psychological anguish, and her reflections are similar to Brian's. "That question again. What did she want? What did she want?" It is within the realm of the everyday—simple people with simple desires asking simple questions—that Kozlowski portrays characters under the greatest amount of stress.

The best stories in the collection are subtle gems that disclose themselves at an andante tempo until fully blooming into bittersweet revelation. "The Sleeping Dog" is a prime example of delicately layered emotions and reflections where the protagonist's thoughts and actions meticulously unfold into something unexpected. Kozlowski knows how to show just enough, and tell even less, until the final sentences bring about a kind of closure where nothing is revealed but everything makes sense. There is no doubt that the stories in Home at Last have been constructed by a developed artist. However, not every story is structured in such a slow-release, surprise-ending style, and there are a couple ("The Tree Kings" and "The Next Voice You Hear") that come up a bit short in hitting that powerful ending. There are stray moments when too much is given away, making the ending a tad predictable. At times, and especially in the concluding story, there are unnecessary explorations of characters' inner worlds that reveal a bit too much and might have been best left unsaid. Though, this minor flaw is made obvious only in contrast to the rest of the collection which remains artfully restrained.

Kozlowski's style is terse and poignant, and at times one can hear the minimalist echoes of Raymond Carver. In "The Tree Kings," Sparky says, "I don't sleep much. I'm not one to lay around. You lay around, you think." With a few words, readers have instant insight into Sparky's disposition. His starkness of thought, a symptom of masculine stoicism, is compounded by being isolated from family—the home from which he is detached. This style of narration is also found in the vivid "Jimmy Think's Witness," where a strip club is the setting for most of the story and the characters are as seedy as they come. The noir narration is bang-on and builds a mood that is at once exuberant and dangerous. Here, Kozlowski experiments with formatting and spelling—nothing too daring, but it adds to the text giving a sense of immediacy. Jimmy's new woman, "…hauls back and sah-laps him right across the face, so hard I feel it"; the word is manipulated just enough to produce just the right effect.

Story after story, the collection builds with situations of misunderstanding in bleak circumstances...

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