SEATTLE COLLECTION

A collection of short stories and poetry that revels in the weird and horrific.

O’Rourke’s pieces cover myriad topics, but they all share similar themes of absurdity and sorrow. The first short story of the collection, “Anomie,” introduces the collection’s grim tone; a man gets drunk alone at a bar before jumping off of a Seattle pier. From there, O’Rourke’s tales read like a fever dream. In another story, “The Cavern,” the protagonist is “sucked into the cavern where [his] heart was” before being chased, naked, by a malevolent crow. Similarly, in “Skinwalker Necrovera,” a terrier named Cvar makes ritual sacrifices before shoving the bodies of his victims into the carcass of a horse he maimed. There’s a deep sadness throughout O’Rourke’s work. In the tale, “Lonesome Treks,” for example, a Fish and Wildlife employee follows migrating caribou as his friend takes his own life; or when an exorcism leaves a father grieving in “Auburn Devils.” The poems in the anthology are equally gloomy, perhaps reflecting Seattle’s overcast climate. In “Emptiness,” O’Rourke writes, “Sometimes, I think about suicide and laugh randomly to myself;” and in “Finale Finale,” “There’s really no such thing / As happiness…Sadness is the plateau of life…And tricked by the rift, you rot.” O’Rourke’s work is certainly ambitious and unfettered, but it’s also roughly hewn, particularly in the prose pieces. At times, the horror feels gratuitous, like when a pet is killed by a hawk in explicit detail in “The Hawk (Nightmare).” Further, O’Rourke’s attempts at evocative prose (“The scent has a thick body I can feel, slithering up my nose, down my throat, encasing my entire body—omnipotent, outside and within”) often result in redundant and clumsy sentences. For example, in “Skinwalker Necrovera,” Cvar notes, a boy “cried so densely Cvars’ hands became soaked with tears to the point that it was as if he had dipped them in a salted pond.” Still, the anthology is often involving and creative.

An imaginative but unpolished collection.