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Through the Pale Door is a coming of age story set in Columbia, South Carolina. Sarah West, the female protagonist is a recent high school graduate from Marietta, Georgia who packs up and leaves her psychotic mom to live with her dad. He gives her a summer job at the steel mill he manages so she can earn some money before going to Emory in the fall. It doesn’t take long for her to meet and fall in love with Edgewood, a fellow mill worker and artist who secretly paints murals around town and lives in an abandoned jail. There is an immediate and mutual attraction and it’s clear to the reader based on the innocence of the language between them that they are each other’s first love. She has barely begun her new life in Columbia when her mother dies and she is left with haunting memories.

Edgewood’s own uncertainty about his future and his art seem to be a welcomed distraction for Sarah. As their relationship develops she encourages him to do more than murals and in return he gives her the strength she needs to move beyond her mother’s death. The finest aspect of this first novel is the prose. The entire book in beautifully written. It is wonderful to see a new writer who clearly loves the sounds of words and dwells on the music they make when strung together to tell a story. “My last Saturday morning in Marietta, Georgia, the mountains stood in the middle of my window as usual, bored and tired of being covered with trees. My high school graduation gown swayed in the closet. It caught some wind from the open window and ballooned out, a kind of momentary sail.” And, “Some memories I find still lying around in the present tense, like broken glass on a bedroom floor, I’m fifteen.” Reading this book aloud is a pleasure.

Though I enjoyed the book, it isn’t without it’s flaws. There are two deaths in this novel of only two hundred pages which seems to be perhaps one death too many. The second death feels a bit forced as if the author wasn’t sure what should happen next. The story is character driven and I suspect could have been stronger if told in third person rather than in first. In addition, there are flaws in the author’s efforts to write from a young woman’s voice. I had not given any thought of the author’s gender versus the narrator’s gender until this line on page seven, “My stomach suddenly felt heavy and began to bulged. I felt the stab of pregnancy, as if a razor-sharp fetus were cutting into the inside wall of my womb.” I read and reread that line trying to consider the effects her mother’s paintings must have had on her, but the words never rang true as an authentic thought from this particular young woman. Still, there is no reason to think that in time Brian Ray will not write from any view point he likes and be admired for his skill the way say, John Irving or Joyce Carol Oates are (two writers that write effortlessly from the other gender’s point of view). Ray has created a beautiful first novel with a musicality to its tone and a charm to its characters that is refreshingly universal—by that I mean everything wasn’t chalked up to being southern. The style is original and the book was a pleasure to read and I hope we see more from him soon.