Fire Down Below — Gwynne Forster

Fire Down Below contains four shorty stories and one long novella. In the first story, a woman who knows her husband is crazy about her over-plays her hand, and her husband's reaction stuns her, as it will stun the reader. The next tale is about a woman who believes previous surgery has left her incomplete as a woman and unable to enjoy love-making. Her surgeon's advice encourages her. She falls in love with a man who cherishes her, and she is never again the same. It is a tender story that will tug at the reader's heart. In another story, a psychiatrist departs from his own professional standard and takes a sex-starved married female client to bed, ostensibly to demonstrate technique. She wants and demands more, and on her terms, finally resorting to blackmail. What they experience entraps him, and he has cause to remember his father's long-ago advice, that his penis and the problems it can cause could ruin his life. The novella tells of the slow disintegration of a once upscale family when the father, an arrogant man who overestimates his own worth, loses his job. Chickens come home to roost when the verbally abused, browbeaten wife comes into her own, rising like a Venus from the sea. In the turmoil, the son, scorned and rejected by the father, triumphs, and the daughter whose father spoiled and pampered her heads toward a life of destruction.