No Turning Back: Stories

The past is a lingering, powerful specter for the characters in Dan Burns' (Recalled to Life, 2013, etc.) motley collection of short stories.

A former mayor tries to outrun a scandal [4], a spy reunites with a childhood friend [82], and an abuse victim struggles to outrun bad memories and the consequences of his own transgressions [100]: these are the kinds of characters who permeate No Turning Back, where the present is shaped by the past and the past is all but inescapable. The stories range from action film-like scenes between a former president and an Iranian leader [111] to a memorable fantasy in which author Ray Bradbury arrives for a surprise birthday dinner [183]. Burns' characters are haunted—by death and loss [37], past scandals [4], and often by their own mistakes [101]. The characters' pasts are well-developed for such short stories, but they have an unfortunate tendency to get weighed down in explaining their own backstories instead of depicting the action of the present. The result is that readers are sometimes left wading through tedious descriptions of the past, but there's no doubt that these long interpolations manage to emphasize the book's message: our pasts shape our present states in complex ways, and unless we can let go, they shape our futures, too. Each story is followed by a brief essay explaining the author's writing process and his thoughts about the story. The author also includes an eight-page introduction, meaning that these stories arrive wrapped in a hefty padding of context and explanation. More intellectual readers will enjoy this, while others may prefer to skip ahead to the stories, which have a variety of intriguing plots that will entice readers' interest even when the pace of the stories occasionally lags.

A diverse collections of stories about dealing with the past.