Night Swimming is a collection of Pete Fromm's fascinating short stories, full of odd-ball characters who seem somehow strangely familiar to us. Young Fromm peeks through the windows of dozen homes whose families are as disfunctional as our own, but whose starkly real situations and reactions enlighten our own daily efforts to enoble our dry, brown lives. One young man gives up his dreams in order to become a janitor in his mother's nursing home, so he can be closer to her in her last days. An couple torn by childlessness struggle over a decision to adopt. An FAA investigator accustomed to eavesdropping on the last "blackbox" conversations of doomed pilots, seems equally an observer in his own relationship with his son, as they stand in their darkened house: " Victor reached an arm out to his son but touched only emptiness." A youth stuck in a desperately boring home finds excitement and kindness in his dangerously wild older sister. But beyond the fascinating characters, Fromm brings us clean, fast-paced detail -- a key to his creation of intimacy: "This isolation is womblike somehow, but all wrong; the world nothing but white noise, dirty white sky, dirty white ice; no place where one ends and the other begins...as I wind through the turn, stumbling on the broken, lumpy ice, the wind begins to nudge me forward, pushing me, urging me on...I don't want to find what it wants me to see." Fromm's views of the Montana landscape become interior portraits of the hearts of lonely children and struggling grownups. His vision is vivid, understandable, and identifiable. His are not words, but thoughts in the reader's head. Some of us study our craft for decades hoping to approach what Pete Fromm has produced in six years. So we read this book to revel in its strange, familiar worlds. And to see how it's done, when it's done well.