Aside from being dead, the boy at the center of J.R. Thelin's stark, eerie, and gripping Those Last Few Moments of Light isn't much different from his elementary-school classmates. He plays baseball; he takes his younger sister trick-or-treating; he juggles crabapples; he keeps a diary. The dead boy even nurses a crush—on a girl with pigtails and scabby knees. Is he in heaven or hell? Or, like his contemporaries—and like all of us, at one point in our lives—is he merely an inhabitant of that unsettling limbo known as childhood? "No one is afraid of the dead boy." Oh, no? Meet him and see.

                                                —Mark Brazaitis
Director, West Virginia Writers Workshop