Each of the nine stories in Brock Clarke's Carrying the Torch ends with a turn – not the O. Henry twist or the Joycean epiphany, but something subtler. Faced with the loss of love or home or family, the characters in Carrying the Torch realize that life demands compromise and loss in return for small graces. These are quiet and hopeful stories that suggest that we not hope for too much.

Though the setting for many of the stories is the South, there isn't a Snopes or old pick-up truck in sight. This is the New South, peopled by Coca-Cola executives and university fund-raisers, who live in college towns and non-descript suburbs. Indeed, most of Clarke's characters are exiled Yankees from Connecticut and New York State, and a theme of homesickness runs through the collection. No one here feels quite at home: not the man who buys Savannah to nurse a broken heart, not the university fund-raiser who dances down her cul-de-sac when she's supposed to be hosting a party for benefactors, not the inhabitants of another cul-de-sac who hold theme parties to forget the various tragedies and betrayals that have caused them all to abandon their tainted homes for a false sense of safety. Even when they move back "home", like the man who takes up residence in the Hotel Utica to be part of a renaissance of "the dying, shuttered downtowns of the industrial East Coast", they find no comfort in familiar surroundings.

Clarke's wistfulness is perfectly balanced by his whimsy. While lacking in the superficial trappings of the South, these stories show their heritage of tall tales and shaggy dogs: the bench warming football player who rides a canary-colored scooter; the woman who fashions a wooden phallus so she can symbolically castrate her philandering husband and parade her trophy through her suburb; the father who dies "in a tragic inner tube accident" and whose ghost appears to his sleep-deprived son with the tube around his waist. One of the stand-outs, "For Those of Us Who Need Such Things," is a sort of lady-who-swallowed-a-fly tale that imagines a world where abandoned cities can be turned into theme parks and refuges for the broken-hearted. The new owner of Savannah finds his city getting away from him as he invites different kinds of people into his world to try to balance each other out, all in an attempt to both forget and impress his estranged wife. When the whole enterprise collapses, his realization that "if you can't have real cities and true love, you settle for the next best thing" is made more poignant by the humor that precedes it.

There characters in Carrying the Torch are rich and believable, the transitions from satire to wistfulness handled deftly, the language playful. While the turns in a few of the stories are sometimes predictable, in others--particularly in "The Ghosts We Love" and Carrying the Torch--they are surprising and satisfying. These two stories, along with "For Those of Us Who Need Such Things" and "The Fund-Raiser's Dance Card", merit re-reading to try to catch Clarke's quiet transitions, and to be caught breathless again by his subtlety.