LAST ONE OUT SHUT OFF THE LIGHTS

STORIES BY STEPHANIE SOILEAU

The characters in this collection face down Southwest Louisiana’s fickle oil economy and their own narrow prospects. A burnout video-game addict tries to drag her obese brother to Mexico for lap-band surgery, hoping this one desperate act will save them both. A spiteful old Cajun looks around in bitterness after a hurricane. A Louisiana expat flirts with an affair. A reluctant teen mother locks her baby in a closet to steal a night out while another mother takes misguided measures to bond with a child who seems to love everyone in the family but her. A Pentecostal singer in a cultish children’s theatre company confronts the taboos of her upbringing. The malevolent ghost of Mark Twain haunts a Depression-era Cajun family. A working-class overachiever at a backwoods boarding school discovers the insidious power of the good old boys’ network in the aftermath of a friend’s sexual assault. A freewheeling swamp philosopher poisons himself on pokeweed and finds transcendence on his bathroom floor. Elderly Cajuns and refugees from Sudan slaughter an escaped cow to reclaim a sense of home. Altogether, the stories in LAST ONE OUT SHUT OFF THE LIGHTS examine the traps and treacherous escape routes of lives lived in a place always on the brink of economic and environmental collapse.