BRATWURST HAVEN

An understated collection of short stories set in small-town Colorado.

Nobody wants to see how the sausage gets made, but the 10 employees of St. Anthony Sausage don’t have much choice. The workers at the Colorado factory, as well as others in the fictional towns of St. Anthony and Laforge, form the beating heart of the first short story collection from King. The book begins with “Railing,” which follows Lance, who got a job at the factory after losing his job as a railway engineer as the result of a horrible accident. He notes the upside of his new gig—“the temperature kept me alert, and the hard work sometimes distracted me from thinking about the man I’d killed”—but still senses that something’s missing from his life. In “A Friendship,” King tells the life story of Joey, another factory employee, from his childhood in St. Anthony to his service in Vietnam to his eventual death. It’s a stunningly sad tale of regret: “He knows it’s his own fault he doesn’t have friends at the end of his life,” King writes in one of the collection’s most heart-rending passages. King explores sibling dynamics in “Middle Age,” about Valerie, a factory inspector who takes a road trip from Colorado to Oregon with her sister, who’s just retired from the military. The trip doesn’t become the bonding experience Valerie had hoped for: “They’d missed years of each other’s lives, and simply answering these kinds of questions now would not make up for that.” King’s writing is straightforward but elegant, and she suffuses the stories here with knowing details of working-class life. She inhabits every character’s voice beautifully and never condescends to them; this is a book written with care and compassion. It’s an excellent collection that’s likely to appeal to fans of Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff—or to anybody with a taste for emotionally resonant short fiction.

Quiet but powerful.