NIGHTJAR

In this exquisitely tailored collection of five stories, Ruskovich plumbs the depths of mystery, memory, and the quiet grief of intimacy.

It’s been almost a decade since Ruskovich published her debut novel, Idaho (2017), a lyrical, kaleidoscopic narrative about the murder of a young girl. Her new collection is quieter in theme, but still probes doubt, grief, and challenging family dynamics with her signature grace and care. Like Idaho, this book has a compelling slipperiness, both in time and reality. Ruskovich’s characters are often in two places in time at once, and she expertly weaves memory and observation to fuse the past and present together. In some stories, this quality mimics a character’s experience of instability. For instance, in “Victor’s Room,” Rebecca questions her husband’s origin story and must grapple with how the truth reshapes their shared life, both in the present and in her memory of their meeting. As the collection progresses, the slippery qualities of narrative apply themselves to the idea of what is real and what is possible. In “I Heard You Singing,” Will regains his intuitive ability to locate people in danger after grieving the unexpected death of his brother. And in the title story, a young girl discovers she can skim the reflection from the surface of a water pail in a goat pen. “Earlier and earlier she rose, and came out to pluck the skin from the surface of the water, to hold it shimmering in her hands, to spread the reflection out upon the boulder,” Ruskovich writes. “She watched it become the stone. The stone became the memory of the water. The stone became the trees, the sky, the past itself.” Much like Ruskovich’s writing, the boulder becomes a palimpsest—a strange, pleasurable embodiment of mysteries layered one on top of the other.

A portal to a haunting, liminal Pacific Northwest.