The Art of Lost Souls
and other stories by
Melanie K. Hutsell
ISBN: 978-1-964277-67-7, 96 pages, $15.95 (+ shipping)
Release Date: February 10, 2026
The Advance Sale Discount price on this title has expired. For those who prefer to pay by check, the price is $21/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.
Melanie K. Hutsell, a Gen Xer from East Tennessee, is the author of two novels, The Dead Shall Rise (Celtic Cat Publishing, 2016), and The Book of Susan (Paraclete Press, 2022), which received an Award of Merit in the 2023 Christianity Today Book Awards and was also highlighted by the Southern Bookseller Review. Her “Celestial Images,” which appears in The Art of Lost Souls and Other Stories, was a Judge’s Selection in the 2013 Literary Contests at Still. Hutsell was chosen as a Featured Author for Knoxville’s inaugural National Authors Day celebration in 2019 and has read on WDVX’s WordStream series. An avid reader and music lover, she currently resides in Oak Ridge.
In The Art of Lost Souls, Melanie K. Hutsell has created a cast of characters both achingly strange and sad. They are misunderstood dreamers, people on the verge of big transitions, wonderers asking what life would look like if all the pieces fit together. But as Hutsell’s characters face loss and uncertain futures, they reveal themselves to be creative souls with imaginations that help them survive. And we are better off for having read their stories. ~Denton Loving, author or Feller
Melanie K. Hutsell’s latest book, The Art of Lost Souls and Other Stories showcases her brilliant descriptive narratives and leaves the senses reeling while the reader journeys to things from childhood, heart pains, generational adultery, and soul touching memories. Her narratives take the reader to places we may want to forget but strive to remember. Ms. Hutsell’s descriptive prose are literary masterpieces that dwell in the brain like an old master’s art, unforgettable and timeless.~ Christy Martin
Melanie Hutsell’s The Art of Lost Souls and Other Stories, paints lives with the most beautiful strokes of utter heartbreak and subtle hope. While you’ve never visited these imagined places, you know every one of these people. I won’t call them characters; they reach from the pages with an immediate realness, many broken, but with longings propelling them, not just from day-to-day in their roughened lives, but from hour-to-hour. Hutsell manages that precarious tether on the page to our delight. ~Larry D. Thacker, Author of Working it Off in Labor County and New Red Words
Free Fall
Julie is driving away from her rented house, her purse slung in the worn passenger seat of her battered Civic. She’s driving like she has forgotten where she left herself. Her floorboards hide beneath scraps of poems, empty candy wrappers, magazines filled with photos of beautiful lives that aren’t hers. Her long hair is tangled and dirty. Her chest feels rusted stuck when it moves. She is shaking, so that her insides are jumbled. She still cannot understand. She tries to put the thought all the way into her head, that one of the street gang kids he loved so much has gone and shot him in the face. She thinks her mother told her this on the phone, her mother must have, but all she can remember is the one thing for certain. Matthew’s dead.
A subtle shift of consciousness that comes to her, she does not know how, suddenly makes everything shatteringly clear, yet far away—her hands on the wheel, the car on the road, even the feel of her heart beating inside. She draws a shuddering breath, sharp, shallow, and cold. She supposes she is driving to Rum Raisin. She knows it is a better place to be, safer than most. She will go in and sit down at one of the dark, gleaming tables. She will smell coffee and cinnamon rolls, and maybe the world will not watch her too intently through the windows there.
By the side of the road, a flock of birds erupts all at once and then turns and wheels through the air. Her heart tumbles though the sky with them.
In the moment. She holds onto the wheel until it hurts. She needs to stay in the moment. That’s what her therapist always says. But every time she breathes, her chest scrapes raw because Matthew’s face comes up into her mind. She last saw that friendly, good-looking face a year ago, when she was home. Matthew had come in, too, for the holidays. They had caught a movie and then stayed up all night in her parents’ living room, talking. He sat Indian-style on the sofa, laughing and eating Cheetos. But his brown eyes looked sad.
“Jules,” he had said. “Listen. You’re going to be all right.”
She bites her lip and holds it. She does not know about that, not now, after he has died and she is still there, going on. He helped her make it through trouble so long she has forgotten knowing anything different. And she has been in plenty of trouble. No matter what crazy thing ever possessed her, whether she stayed up for five nights in a row or spent all her savings on a garden statue of a rabbit when she had no garden, Matthew would simply laugh and shake his head and say, “That’s Jules for you.” She liked the way that felt, like warm bath water in a steaming room, normal and quieting. She feels some of it now as she remembers.
Her lips quiver anyway. Her teeth don’t stop them. Her whole face moves and her chest and her throat. For twelve years Matthew lived next door to her and her family, then found Jesus and moved away, to college, to the rest of his life. He never forgot her, no matter where he went. And now he is dead, because Jesus has gone and killed him. Her tears drop in hot, smoky trickles that turn cold against her skin.
She guides her Civic to the little downtown and pulls off at the free two-hour public lot. She stops the car and grabs her purse and gets out and slams the door. She walks with her head down, curls falling in her eyes and mouth. She doesn’t want to see anybody. She doesn’t want anyone to see her.
If you’d like to read the rest of this story and others included in The Art of Lost Souls, order your copy now and have it shipped to your home when it’s published in early 2026.
