Quinn Dalton's Stories from the Afterlife is my guilty pleasure

I have become a voyeur. It’s Quinn Dalton’s fault. The moral ambiguity of her characters fuels my guilty pleasure of looking forward to savoring one of her short-stories each night before bed. Her latest collection, Stories from the Afterlife, does exact a high price for my voyeurism. I’m haunted by the stories and the characters. Dalton is a master at lovingly creating flawed characters that are so real you can’t help but bond with them. I wish I had more time with them when the last sentence is read.

The protagonists in each story are wildly different – young, old, black, white, gay, straight, adulterous, hilarious, angry, whatever – and yet each one is richly fleshed out and irresistibly tangible.

How I wish I didn’t care about all of these people, that I could skim over a story every now and then. But Dalton doesn’t let her reader off the hook. She doesn’t give us a respite to not care or not feel for even one brief story in the collection.

It may be because Dalton’s life is full to brimming. She wastes not a moment of her time as a mother, a professional and a writer. Since every minute of her day is scheduled and precious, she is a careful steward of the reader’s time as well. She wrote her stories so that each could be consumed at a single sitting. Yet the situations and characters will stay with you long after you close the book and turn out the light.

A vocal champion of the short-story, Dalton chose to publish Stories from the Afterlife (2007) with Press 53 in North Carolina. Her two previous books, the novel High Strung (2003) and her first short-story collection, Bullet Proof Girl (2005) were published by Simon & Schuster.