WAVES OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS

Crime novelist Danenbarger offers an eclectic collection of short stories.

On first examination, darkness seems to predominate in this wide-ranging set of tales. “The Yellow Butterfly” and “Grace” feature abrupt car accident deaths, and suicides occur in “It Means a Lot to Me” and “The Remainder.” Small ripples of light eventually emerge, although sometimes they trail a potential tragedy. For instance, an electrical fire brings together a researcher and an emotionally fragile and isolated reference librarian in “Alexandria: Her Smile a Pulchritudinous Dawn.” An elderly musician in “The Composer” is still creative, despite the challenges of old age. “One Day in the Universe” captures the dichotomy of light and dark that washes over all of Earth’s inhabitants as Helen, a former cosmologist now residing in a retirement home, contemplates her life: “We are tiny specks on a tiny planet, orbiting a tiny star…. All my life, I have stood mired in perpetual awe and dismay.” Interpersonal relationships in these stories are often difficult and painful, and some characters instead turn to the nonhuman in their search for connection; magician Mitch talks to a hand puppet in “The Child,” and an autistic girl’s best friend is a cat in “Death of Angst.” Much of the action plays out in characters’ minds, but Danenbarger beautifully incorporates a sense of place, when needed. In “Seduction,” Richard, who’s from a small town, looks out the window of his 15th-floor Kansas City hotel room; below, “traffic moves like silent fish in illuminated streams. On the sunbaked Kansas farm of “It Means a Lot to Me,” “crickets’ and grasshoppers’ reverberating applause” sounds. Overall, these tales effectively provide portraits of varied points of view, although his protagonists share a complicated and unsettling way of looking at the world, often changing their mind too late. The feline narrator of “Death of Angst,” for instance, doesn’t quite grasp the concept of love, but as he approaches death, he lovingly helps his teenage owner.

A well-imagined and disquieting set of works that will stay with readers.