Florida

Many of the stories in the collection take place in Florida, hence its title. The state's many dangers in terms of weather and predatory animals are used for symbolic purposes to develop the collection's themes, which include the prison of the self, death and the apocalypse, and the unknowable other. The author uses striking description to capture the essence of this setting, from the "hot yellow wool of daylight" (156) in "Flower Hunters" to the "queer dank musk of deep-country Florida" (171) mentioned in "Above and Below." Later in this story, the main character is disturbed by her surroundings when she wanders off into the prairie and imagines nearby predators: "snakes sleeping coiled in their burrows and the alligators surfacing to scent her in the darkness, their shimmy onto the land, their stealthy bellying" (202). In "Yport," the author references the "slow hot drowning" (215) of a Florida summer, and in "At...