Sand, Smoke, Current

***OFFICIAL PUBLICATION DATE: JANUARY 1, 2014***

Sand, Smoke, Current is a collection of short stories written by award-winning author Robert Vander Lugt, whose work is steeped in down-to-earth profundity, are driven by conflicts that beg characters to strip away pretense in favor of a freedom obtained by unflinching acceptance of weakness and grace. Vander Lugt's prose is melancholic without being depressing, humorous without getting tangled in sarcastic irony, and his pen probes the bigger questions at every turn.

"Like letters of encouragement penned by a divine hand, the best of these stories read like parables of a parallel universe . . . Wise, unearthly, and other-worldly stories by an author with feet planted squarely on the ground and an eye cocked toward heaven." — Mark Richard, author of The Ice at the Bottom of the World and a bestselling novel Fishboy.

Robert Vander Lugt’s characters share a certain uncertainty in a fashion that not only makes them shadowy, somehow less (or more) than real, but also lends the stories a fable-like feel, both compelling and mysterious. Don’t get me wrong. Time and place is very real in these stories—we’re with him on the lake front, often in the company of boys becoming men. But the outlines are indistinct enough for all of us to find a place beside them on the beach, in the home, with the family. Vander Lugt’s people are never anti-heroes, unusual in this era; but neither are they fanciful. It wasn’t hard to find myself in this compelling collection of tales. Once there amid the shadows, I didn’t want to leave. —James Calvin Schaap, author of Romey's Place and Touches the Sky

“The storm woke, massed, and then slipped over the frozen lake. Clouds, hunched and rolled like a fighter’s shoulders, leaned and sparred across the star-pricked sky. At the beach they stalled, swept over low dunes. Hissing, they infiltrated the steep wooded hills guarding the shore. It spilled east, gathering speed, racing through the stubbled, sleeping cornfields with maniac delight, a thousand hollow stalks quaking like toneless wind chimes. Winter-stiff trees lined the fields, blacker-than-night sentries latticing the sky. It slammed against their skeletal frames and they rose up, groaning and twisting, frozen fibers cracking like old man bones. Their defense held no weight. The storm grabbed fistfuls of dead leaves, tossing them about like a rampaging child. Then, grasping the trees themselves, it twisted hard maple fingers in a torturer’s grip. Up and down the ribbon of woods, branches popped and cracked and shrieked. Limbs gave way, the trees saved by their rending. Then it began to snow.” -Excerpt from Robert Vander Lugt's story “Onslaught”