THE HEART IS A FULL-WILD BEAST

And Maketh Many Wild Leaps

New and Selected Stories

By John L’Heureux



After death, we live on in the memories of those we leave behind, a Jesuit priest says at the beginning of John L’Heureux’s short story “Answered Prayers.” Over the course of this cheerfully grotesque tale, it becomes clear that he was right, if not in the ways he hoped.

When a drunken driver kills the priest, he can’t get over the guilt. The priest’s face appears to him all the time, but especially — inevitably, horribly — when he tries to have sex. “So this was it,” the priest thinks, called away from his eternal reward to ruin the man’s night yet again. “I’m gonna be summoned every goddamn time!”

“At first,” L’Heureux writes, “he couldn’t figure it out, but after the third time he realized it fitted perfectly with everything he had thought about an ironic God.”

This ironic deity presides over “The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast,” a new collection of L’Heureux’s short fiction. A former priest, L’Heureux retained his faith but left the vocation, and his work is simultaneously impatient with pieties and deeply, even ecstatically, religious.