Stewart O'Nan

And for The Circus Fire -- his non-fiction account of a 1944 fire in Hartford, Connecticut, that killed 167 people -- he read police reports, newspaper accounts, death certificates, the coroner's report and interviewed survivors in order to provide a vivid but factual depiction of the disaster. Here again, his interest in how people react under pressure is apparent -- from ordinary people who risked their own lives to save others, to those who panicked and trampled women and children to save themselves.

The Circus Fire also reveals O'Nan's fascination with the macabre, such as the mystery surrounding the unidentified "Little Miss 1565" whose body was never claimed from the morgue. And his gift for understated creepiness is obvious, as in this quote: "Several survivors said the one thing they will never forget about the circus fire as long as they live is the sound of the animals as they burned alive. But there were no animals."

Readers will find plenty of understated creepiness in A Prayer for the Dying, which won the 1999 International Horror Guild Award for best novel. Based on the true story of a 19th century diphtheria epidemic in Wisconsin, O'Nan's novel is set in a town called Friendship and told from the perspective of Jacob Hansen, a Civil War veteran and the town's sheriff, preacher and undertaker. As conscientiously as he carries out his various duties, he unwittingly introduces the deadly disease into the community and helps it to spread. When the epidemic rages out of control, all order breaks down, and Jacob becomes increasingly unbalanced, leaving the reader to question his motives and his reliability as a narrator.

As one reviewer noted, "This is part of O'Nan's brilliance: He forces us into the same moral snarls as his characters, and then leaves us to work our own way out of them."

"Great storytellers are wonderful liars"

The narrator of The Speed Queen (1997) is also unreliable, but there the similarity ends: Marjorie Standiford's life has been a series of bad choices -- drugs, alcohol, junk food and fast cars. Now she is on death row in Oklahoma, awaiting execution for her part in the murder of 12 people in a fast-food restaurant. Wanting to set the record straight, she tells her story into a tape recorder for a famous writer of horror fiction (think Stephen King) who has bought the rights to turn it into a book. But can you believe anything she says? "She's a wonderful liar," O'Nan said of his creation in an interview. "All great storytellers are wonderful liars." Which can also apply to her creator, of course.

O'Nan's other novels are just as distinct from each other. The elegiac mood of A World Away, the story of a family divided by World War II and its own personal conflicts, is worlds away from the frenetic pace of Speed Queen. And Everyday People (2001) portrays the day-to-day struggle in an urban African-American community in the summer of 1998.

"The New York Times" has called O'Nan "a master of voices and the place they resonate from, of human rhythms and the universal rhythms they cut across." O'Nan himself uses simpler terms to explain the extraordinary range of his writing: "I want to try something different every time. ... Doing everything different is what keeps me interested. Otherwise I'd go nuts."

Gretchen Wiesehan