Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

The Night Before the Elections and other stories

by Patrick J. Clarke

The stories here are stories of childhood. To me, they concern the shift between dependence to independence, comfort to instability, which is disastrous for the characters but also a point of awakening. The move from childhood to adulthood puts the characters in a world that is neither made for the adult or the child, but someplace between these two. It's here that a kind of mystery-in the sense of wonder, terror and subsequently, grace-exists.