2023-05-05
In Fulcher’s multigenre short-story collection, various characters reach moments of psychological—and, in a few cases, physical—disassembly.
Although these stories largely don’t fall neatly into categories, almost all share significant characteristics. Their main characters, overall, aren’t sympathetic; they can be sexual predators, murderers, or thieves, brought to the brink of their own unmaking. Or else they are, as in a tale of a baker who must face a dragon, singularly unprepared for their crucial moment. In the titular story, a fugitive rapist is haunted by his most recent victim and another ghost from his past. In “Drawing the Ace,” an airline passenger loses consciousness during turbulence and awakens as the long-dead partner of the old war veteran seated next to him, flying their last sortie against a German fighter plane. In "Retribution,” a drug dealer takes a tumble, and when he wakes up his former customers are reaching out for him—the dead ones. In the middle of the collection stands “Porch Talk,” the only thematic outlier; it’s a nice moment to pause, as the young man and his grandfather do, before the collection’s chaos begins anew. None of what comes before quite delivers like “The Shamblers,” which opens with “The kids where I grew up didn’t scare too easy.” As with other stories, an awful character—in this case, a preteen who, with his friends, likes picking on their oldest neighbors, the “shamblers”—falls asleep or hits another liminal hinge, and the world changes. However, this work effectively dips into a terrible space where “the dream that didn’t feel so good,” and turns out to be a strange reality. Readers who are willing to pick up a collection for a single fully realized story will find it here, and four others approach its sharp, edge-of-your-seat appeal. Overall, this book creates an environment in which a simple sentence such as “It was just Mom standing there in the open closet” can be the scariest words one has read in a while.
Tales that, at their best, call to mind the work of Stephen King, O. Henry, and Edgar Allan Poe.
