The Altar of the Dead
George Stransom has spent years cultivating his dead. Not passively mourning them, but actively remembering each one, lighting candles in a private corner of a church to keep their names from sinking into the void. When we meet him, he is a man who has made a religion of remembrance, and who is running out of room on his altar. Then he meets a woman who shares his devotion, and for a moment, his solitary grief finds companionship. But James, ever the anatomist of the human heart, complicates things: the woman is connected to a man from Stransom's past who wronged him deeply. The question becomes not just who deserves to be remembered, but whether forgiveness is possible, even in the space we've made sacred for the dead. This is a fable about the lengths we'll go to keep the vanished alive, and the price of including the undeserving in that communion. James writes with the quiet intensity of a man who knows that to forget someone is to kill them twice.
