The sixteen stories in Love to the Spirits are told from a remarkable variety of perspectives, exploring our society with humor, insight, and a touch of the absurd. The collection opens with a twelve-year-old girl and her grandfather hustling pool in West Texas and ends with two feuding brothers in a rickety airplane off North Carolina's Outer Banks, reunited to spread their mother's ashes. In between, a gravedigger is baffled by a body that mysteriously resurfaces after storms; a musician with a stolen mule seeks refuge in his estranged wife's backyard; and a dying con man sells his "service" to the residents of a nursing home-a promise to convey messages to their departed loved ones. Unifying these stories is a common theme: the characters' struggles to complete perilous passages in their lives, across a span of ice dangerously thin. They make their journeys with subtle, often comic, grace. Book jacket.