RaveThe StrangerHaslett’s short-story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, earned a National Book Award nomination and a Pulitzer Prize nomination, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this effort did just as well ... You grow attached to each of the characters, and then right when you start loving one the most, you get yanked out of their head and plunked down into a new view of the same world. The underlying emotional engine of the book (besides Haslett’s masterful control of language, allusions, and scene construction) is the eeny-meeny-miny-moe dread of wondering how much destructive depression the father has passed down to his kids ... The quality of Haslett’s character portrayals, his language, and his scene construction in Imagine Me Gone are apparent enough, but the way you know this book is going to stick around for a while is that—with the possible exception of the prologue—not one word is wasted.
