TORRENTS OF OUR TIME

A collection offers short stories with dark themes.

In an introduction to this volume, Fennell notes: “For the longest time, I couldn’t write directly about mental health.” Nonfiction could not clearly convey his experiences “as someone who lived and loved next to” mental health disorders, and so he opted for fiction: a different kind of truth. Death and familial dysfunction haunt these tales. In the opening story, “Under a Big Moon,” a mother sips a concoction of lemonade and antifreeze. Women who have lost custody of their children turn to drinking and sex work. Kids are frequently orphaned and babies are occasionally murdered, their faces “stiff and blue with dead round eyes pointing to the sky.” The ambitious collection works best in two ways. First, when one story calls back to another. In “The Witch in the Woods,” the title character offers a child a glass of lemonade and the kid thinks “with antifreeze,” skillfully echoing “Under a Big Moon.” More impressive is when a tale finds moments of tenderness to balance the bleakness—a dying man fondly remembers sunshine and his children going off to school. Yet the collection often delivers a single tone: grim. Many of Fennell’s stories, which employ different narrative techniques, create effective tension and suspense. For example, one tale is narrated in direct address: “You look amazing, but there is no one there to tell you, and so I whisper it to you.” Another story is narrated in the third person: “She came out there, and the young girl, Rachael, looked at the…woman.” Unfortunately, some of the tales are confusing. The dialogue is frequently not inside quotation marks and lacks tags to identify the speakers. Readers will find it difficult to disentangle what is dialogue, who the speakers are, and what is narration. The result is that the audience must search for clarity.

Gloomy, suspenseful, and sometimes messy tales.