SOURCE: Allen, Bruce. Review of The Children in the Woods, by Frederick Busch. Chicago Tribune Books (13 March 1994): 6.

In the following review, Allen praises the short stories contained in The Children in the Woods.

Frederick Busch's accomplished and disturbing stories operate as if they're soundings—in which a delicate sensing device is lowered into fissures in the surfaces of marriage and family life, emerging covered with fragmented, bloodied, incriminating minutiae.

Assembled with commanding artistry, they're discoveries of the harm that we, as children and parents and spouses and lovers, unthinkingly do to one another and to ourselves—communicated in a sad, stunned, accusatory tone through which we seem to hear the same realization, “Everybody's a secret from everybody else,” repeated again and again.

Like John Updike, Busch builds vibrating drama from the specificity of everyday actions that are cautiously, sometimes fearfully undertaken. (He can, for example, make us flinch...