For the characters in Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s Lava Falls, loneliness is a striking shared condition. These characters are already in situations of emotional isolation, and their remote settings — Antarctica, Alaska, Yellowstone — don’t give them any relief. This constriction only adds to what’s already inherent: fears of abandonment alternating with needs for love, for others, for attention. Bledsoe puts her characters in close touch with themselves, forcing them to confront their fears. When talking science, to isolate a substance is to obtain or extract it by purification. As a narrative strategy, it makes for great reading.

In Bledsoe’s stories, the physical isolation of vast places, like the North or South Pole, or anywhere stripped of society, pushes wildness — of spirit, of place — to the forefront. The decision to set a story at the South Pole is interesting on its own, as it immediately says something about the characters who journey there, and the setting’s remoteness amplifies any loneliness and isolation these characters already feel. The narrator of “Poker,” for example, lives and works on a National Science Foundation ship in Palmer Station, Antarctica. Speaking with an old lover, she wrestles with past relationships, watches others reach for human connection, and grapples with the loneliness of the work. In “The Antarctic,” two sisters, bound to each other by loyalty but vastly different in personality, take a trip to the South Pole. The trip is driven by a recent breakup for one sister and, for the other, by the fear of dying without having lived much. By putting the pressure of isolation on her characters, Bledsoe sets them up to feel their emotions more acutely. Distance from others gives them time to reflect. All of this, perhaps, offers an opportunity for change.

Bledsoe deftly connects the emotional lives of her characters with their physical lives. In “Girl with a Boat,” the narrator returns after thirty years to her family’s home in the Alaskan wilderness. Having escaped as a teenager, she desires to reconnect with her family. What she finds on returning is not what she expected:

I see in Father what I couldn’t see as a girl. Grief. Huge rolling waves of it. As big as Alaska. As long as the Yukon. As far flung as the Arctic terns. He sits on his beach, the one he’s called home for over forty years, and tried to rest his eyes on his inlet.There is no rest. This place has not supported his family, after all. It has only supported him, one lonely man with an even lonelier dream.

By bringing these characters to these distant places, Bledsoe forces them to face their fears and to confront their desires with a new clarity and freedom.

These remote settings permit Bledsoe to draw on the presence of wild animals as a source of meaning. In “Skylark,” the narrator returns both physically and emotionally to her recent tattoos of the skylark on her chest. When she checks her email after she runs away, she finds that her mother has cut her loose. “Fly, girl. Fly and sing,” her mother writes to her, and by the end of the story, the narrator has done just that, using the power of her voice for good. Elsewhere the line between humans and animal blurs. In “Wolf,” a vacationing couple in their sixties visits Yellowstone where Jim, the narrator’s husband, becomes so fascinated by the people who watch the park’s wolves that he nearly becomes one himself, by inserting himself into the wolf-watcher pack. The narrator, initially resistant to the whole thing, eventually succumbs as well. “I’m surprised he brought me along,” she says. “Couldn’t I be considered a liability? Sure, one astute male who was apparently willing to buy into every single rule had a chance, but I was a dubious female, suspicious, circling on the outside, quite ready to attach from a psychological point of view.” In “The Antarctic,” Bledsoe uses animals to draw a stark contrast between the two sisters at the story’s center. Trying to convince her sister to join her on a trip to the South Pole, Janet complains: “You’ve become a drudge, Regina. No one will want to be around you. You only know how to relate to animals.” Regina retorts, “And animals are all I want to relate to.”

Going beyond setting, Bledsoe draws these feelings of isolation into the characters’ relationships as well. In “Life Drawing,” a teenage narrator is at first repulsed by the neighbor who eyes her as she passes every day while he waters his roses. But then, driven by a romantic rejection and the isolating performance of such “Christian duties” as “speak[ing] the words of the Savior,” she agrees to be sketched by the neighbor. Discovering that he has suffered losses of his own leaves her “immeasurably sad, as if, like [him], she lost everything.” In “The End of Jesus,” the promises of a religious community and the goal of piety fall short once again, as the Church inserts itself between the narrator and her admiration for another teenage girl. With these stories Bledsoe interestingly juxtaposes the social intentions of Christian institutions with their (perhaps unintentionally) isolating effects.

In these stories of shattered bedrocks and rocked foundations, Bledsoe’s guile in her craft leaves characters and readers with insightful gems that cut through the rubble. Perhaps most poignant is the grandfather in “Wildcat” who tells his daughter, “You just can’t cage a person.” These stories attest to that wisdom. People need space, whether physical or psychological, in order to move freely about their lives.

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