by Marcus Pactor | Aug 13, 2013
The stories in Colin Fleming’s Dark March are most clearly connected by two major themes, water and loss. Smaller groups of stories, dispersed throughout the collection, are connected by recurring human and non-human characters: a naval captain of the...
by Marcus Pactor | Jun 10, 2013
In this collection, a woman builds a city of desert sand, another grows a tail, a third destroys her home over the course of many days, and a couple in the near future is quarantined in the midst of a plague. In this promising, but inconsistent, collection, Rollins...
by Marcus Pactor | Mar 11, 2013
In Allen Learst’s collection, Dancing at the Gold Monkey, a group of Vietnam veterans struggle with the question of what comes next. The question already suggests the impossibility of either healing or forgetting. “Next” only comes in relation to what came before,...
by Marcus Pactor | Dec 19, 2012
Slavery in the South seems like an exhausted subject, but Laird Hunt’s Kind One feels fresh. In it, the sadistic Linus Lancaster tries to build Paradise out of dirt and pigs. After his wife Ginny murders him, their female slaves Zinnia and Cleome take over the farm,...
