The world is cruel and painful and sometimes beautiful. “There’s all kinds of meanness and all kinds of mercy, too,” Stephanie Soileau writes in her debut collection of short stories set in southwest Louisiana, Last One Out Shut Off the Lights (Little, Brown and Company; July 2020). 

Like the oil rigs that glimmer on the horizon, just out of reach, the personal topographies of Soileau’s characters are vaguely yet inextricably linked to the oil industry: the late father who worked two weeks on, two weeks off at the rig; the husband who came home with chemical-soiled clothes that his wife threw in the wash with everything else. 

The characters know that the inevitability of their lives—their lack of economic and educational opportunities—is connected to those rigs. But instead of outright naming it, Soileau places the reader in the characters’ minds to fumble around in existential wonderings:

It felt then, as it felt now, like Deana was accomplishing exactly nothing, going exactly nowhere; that she would never type or drive or toke her way out of this place that pinned her like a boulder on her toe, that could only be named after the stink it produced. It was the plants and the heat and the ruthless mosquitoes, the price of gas, the addictive games, the crappy jobs, the hostile rednecks, hopeless brothers, delinquent cousins, complacent mothers, jobless fathers, spiteful uncles, polluted waters, the stifling reek of sulfur and fast food and tanker-truck exhaust. . . . It was all of this and it was none of this. And if it wasn’t this, what was it? It was her. It was in her. It was something awful in her. What candle could light such a darkness?

Soileau’s stories are distinct and imaginative. For the most part, her descriptions feel entirely fresh and relatable, inviting the reader to meditate on the dark forces of desire and futility that permeate our lives. Soileau occasionally veers into magical realism with mixed results: In some places, it adds depth; in others, it is merely confusing.

Many of Soileau’s characters are beset with impossible choices: Single mothers contemplate informing the child’s father that he has a daughter; a clerk at the Payday Loan has to turn away a woman with $20 to her name; a teenager tries to explain to a boy she likes why she can’t date someone higher class. But the characters know that their choices cannot free them from these precarious lives. One young mother thinks, “It was so hard to do anything about anything. It was so hard to love anything, and she could not find a way to love anything more, or to hoist herself out of this pit.”

Economically disadvantaged Southerners are often made into caricatures: rednecks, addicts, trailer home families, teenage moms. Soileau seems intent on humanizing them instead, and is successful insofar as she plies the tributaries of history, patriarchy, and the boom-and-bust economy that converge at the delta of one’s life. But just like the oil rigs that are always out of reach, so is the issue of race. Most characters are assumed white, aside from one story rooted in memories of slavery and one that features a Sudanese family. The omission of Black experience from the collection is glaring.  

Last One Out Shut Off the Lights is not just a tableau of hardship but also, perhaps, a love letter to Louisiana. Soileau’s characters cannot wait to escape, and yet they lean into the landscape’s familiar contours as a sort of comfort: the blue crabs, the dirt roads, the beach with green foam. They are biding their time. “You are in a state of vapid waiting,” she writes. “Your skull is a lean-to and you’re camped out under it, waiting for a change in weather.”