LAKE SONG

Generations of a small town’s families love, lose, and misunderstand each other across a century.

This insightful, often drily witty novel-in-stories is set in the town of Kinder Falls, in the New York state region known as the “burned-over district” because it was a center of religious fervor in the 19th century that birthed the Book of Mormon, the Shakers, and Spiritualism. These stories are set from 1906 to 2006, and their characters are shaken not by religion but by the desires, cruelty, and sometimes-surprising comfort common to the human experience. The first story, “Coaxing Sugar From the Trees,” is about Mavis Staunch, an independent young woman who refuses to sell her family land to the Epps brothers, who want to cut down the maple trees she taps to make a living. That refusal sets off a cascade of terrible events that leaves her dead and a boy named Harley Tuttle gripped in a lifetime of guilt. “The Stone House” finds Harley a grown man who works carving gravestones. An encounter with a suave bootlegger and his charming niece will change Harley’s life in shocking ways. “Galen, on the Clyde River” centers that niece, Lily, now living with Harley in 1938 in a nearby town and supporting them both as a palm reader. In another story, back in Kinder Falls, Harley’s sister Annalee plans to leave town forever with a gentleman full of promises. He’s not as clever as he thinks he is. The next group of stories jumps to the 1950s, picking up the lives of Mitchell Epps, descendant of those greedy brothers, and his wife, Carol, who are trying to be good parents to their angry, sex-crazed teenager Sharon. The stories move on through the generations to “The Final Girl,” set in 1994, with wild girl Sharon now a scary old drunk. She crosses paths with Marlena, a young single mother and descendant of the Staunch family. In the last story, “Six of Swords,” set in 2006, Lily, the palm reader, is over 90 and living amid her ghosts. All of these finely crafted stories are haunted, though, not just by the dead but by missed connections, bungled romances, and links broken between parents and children.

These well-wrought miniatures add up to an engrossing multifamily epic.