In the House of Blue Lights

Susan Neville

Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction

Susan Neville is the Demia Butler Professor of English at Butler University. She is the author of The Invention of Flight, winner of the 1984 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and Indian Winter (1994).

In the House of Blue Lights is an award-winning collection of short stories by Susan Neville. The house referred to in the title is a specific place in midwestern folklore, but the blue also refers to the blue of the globe as seen from space and the blue lights that flicker behind closed eyelids in the house of the imagination.

Reviews

” . . .Susan Neville writes about people, especially women, on the verge, and invites us to watch her characters as they head for what comes next, to admire both the beauty and the menace that can coexist in the moment before something happens. Her prose has the feel of a tale told by someone left to piece things together afterward, exploring the ‘maybes’ in order to explain the almost unexplainable: human frailty, human passion and what occurs at their intersection.” — The Washington Post