Los Angeles Times, The Book Review, front page, Sunday, March 2, 1986 reviewed by Julia Cameron Maureen McCoy takes the sinister and suggestive title of her first novel, Walking After Midnight, from a Patsy Cline country and Western classic. She takes the book's sensibility from it too: true grit, with a side of sweet potato pie. Lottie Jay is McCoy's heroine, a good ol' girl with a knack for nasty situations, a taste for whiskey and whiskers. She's just getting out of a sad situation when the book opens. Taping her diaphragm to the bathroom mirror, she makes a memorable exit from a marriage that is a long, drunken blur. No sooner has she broken out than she breaks wide open: A car crash on a country road lands her in detox, with more than a hangover to repair: "They say we're not supposed to drink again. I'm supposed to feel like I'm Liz Taylor. It doesn't have a thing to do with real life, honey." To Lottie's horror, she soon discovers sobriety has everything to do with life. "You know the feeling of novocain when it's wearing off and everything aches and tingles…" Sobering up, Lottie finds she has misplaced entire chunks of her life. "I'm not used to just staying in a house making up things to do." By "making up things to do" she means "real" things, not the kind of fantasies that were her drunken speciality. Sober, she must either pursue her dreams or give them up. As it happens, her chief dream is to be a country and Western songwriter. Drunk, she wrote a ream of songs and stored them all in her panty drawer. Sober, she worries about their merit. "What if I had created terrible little fried egg songs?" "One less bell to answer, one less egg to fry," is the "pitiful" song about lost love that Lottie refuses to identify with. Not for her the homely hurts and healings. She wants her songs, like her life, to be iconographic: "I liked clothes to satisfy an intention deeper than practicality, to be an armor. I had rustled into the hospital in taffeta plaid…" Leaving the hospital, Lottie Jay finds she can't sashay straight into the sunset. Building a real life takes work, and this news is too much for her at first. Peeved, although she might prefer "heartbroke" over the vagaries of a married man, she picks up a drink and, just like the country songs warn her, "falls to pieces." Getting sober a second time, the time that will stick, Lottie has to learn a whole new rhythm—no more gray days and black-and-blue nights. Instead, she finds there is a range of pastels to be dealt with, emotions too subtle for the gradations possible through a fifth of Jim Beam.  "through a glass darkly" takes on a whole new meaning, watching Lottie Jay lighten and brighten as the book unfolds. If her heroine believes clothes should satisfy more than practicality, dressing to kill the pain, McCoy the author wears language with the same panache, wrapping her story in sentences with a style all their own.  Sometimes she goes in for girlish froufrou. "My sundress was the color of grapes, mouth-watering beautiful…" Sometimes she goes for the jugular: "Last night the wind had gusted around the farmhouse, and Judd lay forever propped on the bed, facing a loud TV, drinking." Pulling images from a cultural grab bag as overstuffed as her favorite Woolworth's, Lottie Jay dishes out a sassy-voiced perspective that is quite a tonic for a reader dined long and lean on the clipped, coked sentences and stylized emotions of the Manhattan novel currently in vogue among publishers. Not once does Lottie muse about snuff films, muggers, therapy or Bloomingdale's. Her dream lover is Elvis Presley. "The breakfast aroma, the smell was the start of a day not yet awake to complications." In a year that saw too many novels about too few things, a novel like Walking After Midnight is just as refreshing as Cedar Rapids' oatmeal breeze. "Write about what you know" has long been a useful bit of writer's lore, and McCoy, nurtured at the Iowa Writers Workshop, takes it to heart, filling her book with Midwestern bric-a-brac, as poetic and homely as old farm implements, as powerful and as spare. Reading a book like this one, with a sense of place and a sense of humor, is enough to nudge awake the hope that American fiction is alive and well, not just living in Manhattan. Maybe it's just gone off somewhere, down some dirt road, walking after midnight, "anywhere, all hours. Standing still, you'd combust." It is in her horror of "standing still" that Lottie Jay—and her author—step into new ground. For Lottie, it is a new life made up of small things: mint chip sundaes shared with a new lover; gardening shared with her landlady's son; the very first time she gets a song with a double internal rhyme, a triumph that she shares with her Elvis poster. For McCoy, it is a whole series of small and risky choices: a heroine who is sexual and sentimental too; sex scenes that tread too close to the funny bone for comfort; a hero who doesn't save the day but lets the heroine do it for herself "one foot trusting to thin, thin air." Walking After Midnight is a very fine book. "A Woman in search of freedom and awareness"  The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, Dec. 15, 1985 reviewed by Karen Rile It's treacherous reading first novels these days. The literary industry is so hungry for new voices that some young writers are being prematurely ushered into print, energy and unfiltered talent, though precious, can propel the inexperienced novelist toward such disastrous tailspinning that an ingenious opening may, paradoxically, serve to a make a reader nervous. You can't help but worry whether a fledgling author is going to possess the skill to complete what she's begun with finesse. Walking After Midnight by Maureen McCoy has a brilliant first chapter. Every phrase crackles. Each successive sentence is more exquisite than the last. That's quite remarkable considering that this talky, first-person narration comes from the mouth of an alcoholic typist by the name of Lottie Jay, a 30-year-old woman who obsesses over painting her toenails, worships Elvis Presley and calls everyone "Honey."Lottie lives with her husband, Judd, a bleak (bleaker because it's February) farmhouse outside dreary Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It's a momentous morning for Lottie, who has decided to run away from home. Fortified by booze, she manages both to pulverize her "Dusty Rose Pink" vintage 1957 Chevy and to survive. The narrative is punchy, perfectly pitched and genuine. You find you've made an investment in Lottie Jay because of the momentum kicked up by Chapter 1, and you want this book to work. It's an old plot, the story of an adult who finally grows up. And despite its distinctly American middle-class milieu, what Walking After Midnight most calls to mind is the elegant architecture of a Jane Austen novel. On page after page, McCoy retains precise control, so by the third flawless chapter you've developed confidence enough to forget you're reading a first novel. Because Lottie's alcoholism has stunted her emotional development, she still—at the age of 30—needs to experience several rites of passage. She moves through the novel making mistakes, and stepping forward. She's intelligent, if not educated, and it's gratifying to watch her learn.  Lottie is looking for Mr. Right, but this is the mid-1980s, the Midwest, and her range of possibilities encompasses three new men, her drunken ex-husband, a few women and, of course, herself. While Lottie suffers, bumbles and blossoms, the reader has the pleasure of feeling a little wiser than the character—you can usually foretell which of Lottie's friends will turn out to be a sham and which will be good-hearted.  Yet while she's naive, you admire Lottie. She has spunk: She's living through emotions, if not situations, that you recognize from your own experience, and it's consistently engrossing to travel inside her head. McCoy maneuvers the reader subtly, enjoyably. Walking After Midnight is funny, though never at the expense of dramatic tension. More than that, the descriptive language is so fine that you wonder whether McCoy hasn't also trained as a poet. The text is replete with texture, ranging from the chalkiness of matte-finish face powder broken through with "polka dots of sweat" to the gloss of "pearlescent magenta" toenails. You can inhale every odor in this story, redolent with its "armpit smell of McDonald's," cheap perfumes and sweet cakes baking. And McCoy's use of light is extraordinary throughout. Her painterly manipulations of the color wheel suggest a complete spectrum for which the grayish Cedar Rapids proves a perfect canvas ("The place was lit up screaming yellow inside…". .that certain color of neon blue that signals beer all over the universe….", "The pink lady raised a giant gray mitten towards my face.  She might have been taking an oath as the world dissolved behind a magenta wash.") This is a seamless world. It's a novel that college lit majors could successfully dissect and leave unscathed--still fascinating fun.  It would be quibbling, in fact, to call this work flawe3d. Yes, it's airbrushed, consistently glossy—there aren't any nubby ends to grab. But who would want to quibble? Maureen McCoy has enormous talent, and her first novel isn't only promising, it's promise fulfilled.