From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet

Brutality, defeat, loneliness, and mournful longing haunt and ignite Finn’s collection with an assembly of unforgettable characters confronted by life-changing crises that force them to make impossible choices. Two brothers try to survive their father’s unexpected death by protecting their widowed mother from a drunken sexual vulture at a cousin’s wedding reception; the last orphan in an aging foster mother’s house tries to escape the abusive homophobia he faces in a rigidly-masculine Catholic high school; and a former quarry trucker, after thirty years in prison for murdering his sister’s rapist, is hired as a bouncer by a Greek immigrant who tries to save his failing restaurant by transforming it into a nightclub of seductive belly dancers. Set in the gritty Rustbelt of Joliet, Illinois during the early 1980s, its rickety skyline of smokestacks, steeples, and rotting telephone poles, its abandoned houses, basements, quarries, and rail yards, Finn’s fictional world is breathtakingly constructed with prose that is both lush and crisp, imagistic, deeply evocative, and instantly memorable.