Cascade: Stories

by Craig Davidson

Overview

From the best-selling author of The Saturday Night Ghost Club comes this collection of seven brilliantly cinematic short stories.

Set in the Niagara Falls of Craig Davidson’s imagination—known as "Cataract City"—the superb stories of Cascade shine a shimmering light on this slightly seedy, slightly magical, slightly haunted place. The six gems in this collection each illuminate familial relationships in a singular way: A mother and her infant son fight to survive a car crash in a remote wintry landscape outside of town. Fraternal twins at a juvenile detention center reach a dangerous crisis point in their entwined lives. A pregnant social worker grapples with the prospect of parenthood as a custody case takes a dire turn. A hardboiled ex-firefighter goes after a serial arsonist with a flair for the theatrical even as his own troubled sister is drawn toward the flames. These are just some of the unforgettable characters animating this stellar collection that crackles with Davidson’s superb craft and kinetic energy: in the steel-tipped prose, in the psychological perspicacity, and in the endearing humor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393866902
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/26/2021
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Craig Davidson is the author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize–nominated novel Cataract City and Rust and Bone, which was the inspiration for a Golden Globe–nominated feature film of the same name. Davidson lives in Toronto, Canada.

Editorial Reviews

"Davidson’s prose is very sharp but never only sharp; it is alive, it is limpid, it is darkly funny, and it never hides or shies from love. You should read this collection now, so that you can read it again, in the winter, and again next spring."— Amy Bloom, National Book Award finalist and author of White Houses

From the Publisher

2021-07-28
Disquieting stories that explore how people’s lives can be upended in a single moment.

Davidson, who also writes horror novels under the pen name Nick Cutter, does not shy away from looking point-blank at tragedy and the human propensity for cruelty. “The Ghost Lights” opens with the narrator blinking open her eyes. She’s hanging upside down in her car, her husband dead beside her, his neck severed by a tree branch. In the back seat her baby is “a pocket-sized executioner with a white hood over his face.” In “One Pure Thing,” a pro basketball player’s career ends when he climbs into the stands and punches a heckling fan, who falls down the stairs, hits his head, and winds up dying. “The Burn” slowly unfolds what happened to a Marine while he was serving in Iraq and shows how this past shapes his relationship with a high school girl recovering from a brain tumor. While these stories spotlight big, dramatic moments, Davidson’s real gift is for closely observing small actions, like the mechanics of a big man driving toward the basketball hoop or a woman trying to unlock the door of a crashed car or a Marine helping a girl with disabilities sit on a toilet. Defamiliarization is the art of making the familiar new; Davidson’s prose takes the unfamiliar—the extraordinary, whether good or bad—and makes it an embodied experience. You feel it in your bones. The final pieces are mostly concerned with how children must live with their parents’ choices: In one, a surgeon is physically malformed because his mother drank while she was pregnant with him, while in another, a child-services worker confronts everything from negligent to evil parenting and concludes that “some people shouldn’t be parents.”

Chilling tales of misfits and misfortune by a masterful writer.

Kirkus Reviews