After he won the 1986 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for his first collection of short stories, Under the Wheat, Rick DeMarinis told an interviewer about his career-long interest "in the demonic underpinnings of everyday . . . events": "in things that appear rather normal and rather wholesome," DeMarinis noted, "there's always an element of darkness." The ordinary and the troubling are the twin poles of many of DeMarinis's short stories, which have been published in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and Harper's for more than twenty years. An accomplished novelist as well, DeMarinis has been critically acclaimed for the humanity, generosity, and incisiveness of his portrayals of "ordinary" characters whose lives somehow spin inscrutably toward the edges of various forms of human darkness--including violence, drug addiction, voyeurism, professional failure, and failed relationships. For DeMarinis's characters "the fix is in"; he told The New York Times (30 October 1988): "[my characters] are not...