Fire Down Below

By Gwynne Forster

2012

First Published

4.00

Average Rating

Number of Pages

2H50M

Audio Length

Fire Down Below contains four shorty stories and one long novella. In the first story, a woman who knows her husband is crazy about her over-plays her hand, and her husband's reaction stuns her, as it will stun the reader. The next tale is about a woman who believes previous surgery has left her incomplete as a woman and unable to enjoy love-making. Her surgeon's advice encourages her. She falls in love with a man who cherishes her, and she is never again the same. It is a tender story that will tug at the reader's heart. In another story, a psychiatrist departs from his own professional standard and takes a sex-starved married female client to bed, ostensibly to demonstrate technique. She wants and demands more, and on her terms, finally resorting to blackmail. What they experience entraps him, and he has cause to remember his father's long-ago advice, that his penis and the problems it can cause could ruin his life. The novella tells of the slow disintegration of a once upscale family when the father, an arrogant man who overestimates his own worth, loses his job. Chickens come home to roost when the verbally abused, browbeaten wife comes into her own, rising like a Venus from the sea. In the turmoil, the son, scorned and rejected by the father, triumphs, and the daughter whose father spoiled and pampered her heads toward a life of destruction.

Avg Rating

4.00

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

50%

4 STARS

3 STARS

50%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Gwynne Forster

Author · 44 books

Died January 16, 2015. Fiction writing is Gwynne Forster’s second career. She holds bachelors and masters degrees in sociology, a master’s degree in economics/demography and has additional graduate credits in journalism. As a demographer, she is widely published. She is formerly chief of (non-medical) research in fertility and family planning in the Population Division of the United Nations in New York and served for four years as chairperson of the International Programme Committee of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (London, England). These positions took her on official business to sixty-three developed and developing countries. Gwynne sings on her church choir, loves to entertain, and is a museum hopper, gourmet cook and avid gardener. She enjoys classical music, opera, jazz and blues with her husband with whom she lives in New York City.