With astonishing agility Lynn Kilpatrick slits the fragile skin of identity to expose a thousand marvelously dangerous possibilities.
In the House
Lynn Kilpatrick
2010
Quality Paper
ISBN 978-1-57366-154-6
E Book
ISBN 978-1-57366-815-6
In Lynn K. Kilpatrick’s In the House, anything can happen. A collection of shorts — lists, character sketches, directions, scripts, and instructions — In the House reveals the often conspicuous, yet frequently overlooked, dangers of relationships gone awry.
In a home suffused with fragility, or in a kitchen surrounded by knives, Kilpatrick’s men and women navigate around one another’s eccentricities with caution, highlighting the unspoken desires and veiled needs of domestic routine. In these stories those desires collide, illuminating the dangers that lurk pantries, a basements, the Miss America pageant, dioramas, or in the mind of the one you love.
With astonishing agility Lynn Kilpatrick slits the fragile skin of identity to expose a thousand marvelously dangerous possibilities. You might be the child who disappears or the girl who becomes Miss America. Either way, your life is precarious, held in place by your own tenuous illusions and the wild confabulations of the woman on the other side of the glass, your bold, inventive neighbor.
In the House is a dazzlingly smart and deeply funny excavation of what goes on behind closed doors. Lynn Kilpatrick’s characters are at once bizarre and entirely recognizable and the stories she tells about them are tender and sharp and full of heart. This is a book that is brave enough to say what most of us won’t and wise enough to remind us why that kind of bravery matters.