Red Light Run: Linked Stories

Baird Harper

Aug 2017 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

A brilliant feat of storytelling, Red Light Run is the radiant and stunning debut from Best New American Voices writer Baird Harper.

When two cars collide at an intersection in a leafy Chicago suburb, Hartley Nolan is not the person police expect to find behind the wheel. After all, he barely drinks; everyone knows it’s his wife who’s the alcoholic. But the bigger question on people’s minds is what brought Sonia Senn, dead at the scene, back to her hometown in such a hurry that night?

In eleven tightly linked stories, Red Light Run pulls us into the inner lives of Hartley, Sonia, and a host of other characters to untangle the mounting forces that carry them to their fates. Among the ensemble in this prismatic collection are a real estate agent who seeks gossip on the market rather than houses, a trailer park developer whose entire livelihood is laid to waste by a single cigarette, a divorced mother battling her daughter-in-law for hegemony over her kitchen, a widower hell-bent on destroying the invasive species of beetle that’s wiping out his oak trees, and a down-and-out handyman with a desperate plan for revenge. And then there’s Sonia Senn, with a dark secret of her own, and Hartley Nolan, who has risen above his roots to become a commodities trader in Chicago only to end up sentenced to eight years at Grassland State Prison. With infectiously grim humor and wry insight, these characters contemplate their realities in relation to one tragic moment, propelling us toward a startling revelation about the long and sometimes crooked arc of justice.

Ratings and reviews

After spending four years in prison for vehicular manslaughter, Hartley Nolan is released and back at home with his parents and his wife. Supposedly he was driving drunk when involved in a car accident and where the wife of a prominent resident was killed. But she had been racing from another town to get to her hometown in the middle of the night. This is basically a story that is written in a series of short stories showing how if you pull one thread, the sweater unravels. This one action touched many different people in one way or another. Each of the voices has a story to tell, from their own viewpoint. This was an interesting reading experience. The idea of writing a story within a set of short stories has never occurred to me. The beginning (or first short story) drew me in. But the middle is bit jarring, not evenly paced. The ending put everything in place. I have to confess, there were few characters that I actually liked or felt empathy for. The main characters were cleverly written, secondary characters not so much. Many thanks to the author / Scribner / Netgalley for the digital copy. Opinions expressed here are unbiased and entirely my own.

About the author

Baird Harper’s fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Tin House, StoryQuarterly, and The Chicago Tribune, among other publications, and has been anthologized in New Stories from the Midwest, 2015; 40 Years of CutBank, Stories; and twice in Best New American Voices. The recipient of the 2014 Raymond Carver Award for Short Fiction, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, and the James Jones Short Story Award, Harper lives in Oak Park with his wife and two kids, and he teaches creative writing at Loyola University and the University of Chicago. Red Light Run is his first novel.