The Mighty Red

by Louise Erdrich

She loved Hugo with that superb kind of love a mother has for a male child, a love that is deeper and more pure for knowing that he’ll more than likely turn out a fool.

To love with canine devotion was to live in a state of miserable exhilaration, to exist on a knife-thin edge of joy.

Once Mary and Darva began competing over worst-case ways to perish, the book club usually spiraled into ghoulish hysteria.

‘Suicide always leaves someone else holding your pain,’

The cult had rejected him for being a Catholic because they didn’t accept people who already belonged to a cult.