The most telling example of this storytelling is appropriately titled "The Ordinary, "in which we are told about the protagonist, Maxine Britt, "Her homeliness was not just a homeliness appearance. She was through and through homely. She was no more clever than thousands, perhaps millions of others. She could read all the books she wanted and would never be any more clever than she was now. How long life was! How many people were barely distinguishable one from another!"

Horne is writing not just about Maxine, a Mormon girl whose parents sacrifice so she can attend Brigham Young University, a girl with an older brother who goes to war in Korea and a younger brother who goes to war in Vietnam (Horne thus buttresses this and most of his stories within a time period famous for its cultural stagnation), but about one culture synchronizing with another.

Horne is a fiction writer, and a good one, and he does not pretend to a be a social historian. Still, if he wanted to make a case that the '50s and early '60s were the key transitional points at which Mormon culture finally ended a long exodus out of cultural isolation and into the American mainstream, the fictional facts of these stories would help to prove his thesis.

In "Seeing Strangers," Fred the narrator, tells his girlfriend, Lissie, "You're too strait-laced, honey. Don't be that way. Don't be a prude." Later Fred, a high school student, realizes he admires some older students for "their being in a post-virgin world, a territory with such teasing borders," and he wonders about the possibility of he and Lissie entering that world: "What would we be after we crossed that border?" These stories take place not so much on one side of the border, but on the border itself.

That border, in the process of becoming so thin it is invisible as these stories unfold, separates cultures, and even if one of those cultures is religiously based, it's the culture and not the religion that provides the backdrop in front of which these characters act out their roles. In "Best Friend," Cleve does turn to God when he feels loneliness because his best friend has moved out of the apartment they shared to get married: "I feel two hundred years old," Cleve tells God. And we're told, "The Lord said nothing."

In the title story, "The House of James," some things not ordinary do happen—two men move in with one woman while she figures out which one she loves, plus a murder—but the focus is less on that than on James, who rents rooms in the house he owns, a rather ordinary experience. Most of his tenants are referrals from the Mormon church he attends. ("Finding house mates was never a problem once he joined the church. There always seemed to be single Mormon men looking for a room.") One of the roomers, Amos, has sex with another man, Zola, and both later move in with Polly, who chooses Amos, because Zola is a drug user, and the two men fight in the street and Zola is killed. This story is set clearly on one side of the border, in the '90s. It could be read, although it's probably not intended to be, as an example of what happened as a result of crossing clearly to one side of the border.

In "The Red Iris," set largely in Colorado in the early '60s, a young wife drops out of music school so her husband can attend law school. The wife, Linda, a Mormon from Wyoming, is described in the same tone Horne used with Maxine in "The Ordinary": "The hips wide and the bust full, the legs sturdy." It's easy to be reminded of Mark Twain's line in Roughing It about believing polygamy was a great evil until he visited Salt Lake City and saw what Mormon women looked like.

But Horne doesn't strive for Twain's entertaining wickedness, but rather for a carefully sculptured rendering of a culture within a culture and how one becomes absorbed by the other. It's a masterful accomplishment. Thin transparent stories that let in the light.

Saskatoon Star Phoenix, Verne Clemence
Whatever Lewis Horne may lack in quantity, he more than makes up for in quality. That is what makes the arrival of another of his short story collections an event of note. The House of James is only the second prose book in ten years for the retired Saskatoon English professor, though his stories have appeared widely in literary magazines and anthologies. He also had a book of poetry published in the 1980s, and his first short story collection, What Do Ducks Do in Winter? came out in 1992.

Fans of Horne's work will likely recall that he came here to join the faculty of the U of S English department in the early '70s. He was raised near Mesa, Arizona, a place, he said in a 1993 interview, where the Mormon church was a strong influence.

And again, as was the case with the first book, the church is a factor in most of the nine stories in The House of James—not in the sense of proselytizing, just as part of the fabric of the lives of those he writes about.

If there is a marked difference between the two collections, it is that the settings for several of the stories in the new book are more generic in nature. What Do Ducks Do in Winter? Evoked the regional themes of the author's youth. The House of James could be anywhere, and indeed it mentions Saskatoon as the setting for more than one story.

But all of that is secondary to what makes Horne's short fiction so accessible and comfortable. His characters have the ring of authenticity because they are recognizable. They encounter the obstacles and issues in their lives that most of us encounter. They're vulnerable and as often as not the adversity in their lives is self-inflicted, as opposed to just being the vagaries of normal existence.

Horne writes about the possibilities and the impossibilities in family relationships and those in the broader community. In the opening story, "Seeing Strangers," a naive young farm boy gets caught up in the confusion of first love when the girl of his dreams moves to the farm down the road. In the end, he's left to agonize over the moments lost, those occasions when things unsaid counted for more than his awkward silences and pained utterances could express.

Four youths live together in "The House of James," the title story. They are seemingly quiet and earnest young men. Two of them are devout and faithful churchgoers. But moments of stress, and finally a flare-up of violence, reveal dimensions to three of them that were not readily apparent, even to them.

"The Ordinary" perhaps best illustrates the author's deft characterizations. The story is about Maxine Britt, a young woman who at an early age comes to the realization that she is a plain person, from a plain family. "She realized, peering in her mind's eye at the group of them, her own figure included, how humdrum and ordinary—less than ordinary—they were. Her homeliness was not just a homeliness of appearance. She was through and through homely. She was no more clever than thousands, perhaps millions, of others. She could read all the books she wanted and would never be any more clever than she was now."

Typical of Horne's stories, there is no white knight to sweep Maxine off her feet. Her humdrum life is momentarily disrupted when somebody breaks into her apartment and steals her diaries. No culprit is caught, however, no motive is revealed, and soon it's back to life as usual.

Horne writes of dreams and dreamers, like the Korean War vet who tries to convince a simple-minded friend to go with him into the mountains to find a lost mine and claim a fortune. He writes of failure, as in the case of the man whose whole story consists of his heartfelt plea to a church council hearing. He's asking the counselors to overlook his many transgressions and help him "get his testimony back."

Did the two find their mine? Did the church council find in favor of the man? It's for us to decide. No pat answers, is Horne's code, just as it is in real life.

This is a collection of stories to savor. Signature Books of Salt Lake City is the publisher. The paperback price in Canada is $23.95, and the book is available locally.

Irreantum
Four college-age roommates live in James's house. Two are Native American, one of them a parolee. All attend church, more or less. Onlyone perceives the conflicts that will eventually turn the house against itself. In each of these short storeis by Lewis Horne. There is a glimplse inside someone's intimate space through the eyes of young neighborhood peepeing toms or a burglar who steals a young woman's diary or through the writer's ablility to see beyond the structures we build around our selves.