Preview of Black Tickets Summary:

These stories are mostly concerned with love and alienation (the absence of love). Love's absence (or its imminent loss) and the feeling of being an outcast cause characters to inhabit a nightmare world. In "Lechery," a fourteen-year-old orphan joins two drug addicts in their travels, selling pornography to school boys whom she then seduces. In "Souvenir," a suburban girl returns home to her mother who is dying of cancer. Stories about the loneliness and sadness of family life in the suburbs are juxtaposed with portraits of the outcasts of society to point out the similarity in their emotional predicaments. Nobody can quite find a recognizable world in which to belong. In "Gemcrack," a meditation from the point of view of a mass murderer, the murderer tells readers that "mostly I'm invisible." In "Home," a college-age girl returns home to a divorced mother who talks constantly of cancer. After...