The fires
By: Rene Steinke.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Morrow
Published: 1999
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 243
Subjects: Pyromania -- Fiction.; Mothers and daughters -- Fiction.; Young women -- Psychology -- Fiction.
Genres: Fiction.
Description: Rene Steinke invites us into the troubled psyche of Ella, a young woman torn by inner demons that drive her to pyromania and promiscuity, a woman as enthralled by flames as others are by love, a narrator so lucid in her madness as to raise The Fires to the level of high romance.

Badly scarred in a fire and stigmatized as a child, Ella, now twenty-two, lives in the small town of Porter, Indiana. She has recently dropped out of college to work as a clerk at the local hotel. Slowly, she begins to realize that she is entangled in a complicated web of secrets surrounding her father's death, her grandfather's suicide, her aunt's mysterious disappearance, her mother's descent into anorexia and depression, and her own tragic childhood accident.

As Ella struggles to come to terms with her family's tormented past and her own uncertain future, she draws the mesmerized reader ever deeper into her scorched soul, revealing a sensuality that will spiral into final, fiery destruction - unless it can be quenched by love.