Stephen Billias

A Book of Fields: Tales from the Pioneer Valley Stephen Billias

Three kids rob a diner in Greenfield where everyone knows them. A boy goes to the Big E in West Springfield and runs away with the circus. An animal control officer has to shoot a moose in Sheffield. A ghost still roams the flooded and sunken town of Enfield. A prep school teacher in Old Deerfield reenacts the raid of 1704 with his students, to disastrous results. These deceptively simple fictional stories share two commonalities--first, each one ends in the name of a town that ends in "field"--Ashfield, Northfield, Plainfield, and so forth. Second, most of the stories contain a crime, or something like one, but this is not a crime novel. It's an exploration of this magical landscape in the Pioneer Valley (or slightly beyond), populated not by magicians or wizards but by very real human beings; it's a portrait of a changing world and the men and women who inhabit it: hardy, independent, passionate, hardheaded, sometimes a little crazy.