A Lucky Strike for God and Other Stories

Susan Patrick is a librarian at Ryerson Polytechnical University.

The short stories in this collection are linked by themes of
disappointments and shattered dreams in relationships between lovers,
husbands and wives, parents and children. This is the territory of bad
marriages, unsatisfying love affairs, disaffected spouses, and
bewildered and restless children. The outlook is bleak and pessimistic,
with death, cruelty, sin, warped religious notions, and strange secret
rituals of childhood featured. Pietkiewicz’s writing style is powerful
and full of inventive imagery, and the stories are effective and moving,
but the cumulative effect of reading about these unhappy and unfulfilled
characters is one of unrelenting gloom.