In fiction as in life, war and natural disasters are the most ruthless villains imaginable. Both are protagonists in the stories of The Queen of Bad Influences, the refined assortment of calamities set during actual incidents by Jim Shepard (The Book of Aron). Two war stories are epistolary works: "Our Day of Grace" is an exchange of letters between Civil War soldiers and their spouses (with one man writing somberly, "This war is a graveyard for virtues"); while "Where Are the Lads of New Zealand Tonight?" highlights correspondence from a British officer at a medical training center in Egypt during World War I. Other war tales include "Children of the Sun," in which Spanish soldiers who served in the Arauco War in Chile return to Madrid to lobby for back pay; and the title piece, in which two women discover a forbidden attraction before sailing on the RMS Lusitania.
Other stories bedevil characters with natural disasters, among them "Village of Islands," set during a 1935 Florida hurricane; "Privilege," which occurs during the Johnstown, Pa., flood of 1889; and "Engineer of Safe Havens," set during Maine's Portland Gale of 1898. A different kind of potential destruction is at the center of "The Mentally Ill Are Not Alone," an autobiographical piece about the author's older brother, a high-school dropout sent to a Yale-New Haven mental health facility, with his parents fearing he'll be "conveyor-belted into institutions for the rest of his life." There's plenty of pain to go around, but Shepard's storytelling sophistication makes it all palatable in this excellent collection. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer