Ien Nivens

Tangible Angels Ien Nivens

Vanessa Cavendish keeps to herself and minds her shop by the canyon on the outskirts of Keening, Oklahoma. She has but one employee, a gothed-out rebel debutante in fishnets and a ratty tutu. Both women have their secrets to keep. But after hours, when a freak blizzard traps them together in her house, Vanessa learns how deep the troubled waters in Jeannie Ivory run. Jeannie says she invented the adopted son of a prominent Keening family. She claims he isn't real. Claims he terrorizes her. She spins out her bizarre account of Eugene "Sewer Boy" Lamb's unlikely rise from exurban legend to flesh-and-blood angel of polite, evangelical society. Confident, accomplished, and so beguilingly good, Eugene is everything Jeannie Ivory can never be again. Every life he touches he seems to charm, including Vanessa's. But how much goodness can a woman tolerate, when the cost of it is paid in another woman's dignity, sanity, and blood? All Jeannie needs is a witness. All she wants from Vanessa is a little faith. Is that too much to ask? Tangible Angels treads an imaginary line between Magical Realism and American Gothic Horror.