First, body

A distinctive voice marks Melanie Rae Thon's fiction. The nine stories in this new collection are peopled by characters who live on the margins, in landscapes both urban and rural. In the heartbreakingly comic title story, a 326-pound woman in a Seattle morgue pins a Vietnam vet to the floor. In "Necessary Angels," a young girl in Florida reveals the secret dangers of her privileged life: alligators and furious ducks, a crippled grandfather, a burning car.

Taking us from the cobblestone streets of Boston to a deserted Montana road, Thon's stories set us in the borderlands, in the places where sudden accidents and misguided passions make it impossible to return to the safe territory of a former life.