Book Review

It starts with a fridge and ends with spilled milk.

David Ryan will turn the objects around your house into weapons: A cartoon logo, a thrifted shirt, a ringing phone, a fable read as a wordless lullaby, all become tools that plumb the psyche in his second short story collection, Alligator. In one piece, a high schooler is shown a cooler full of incomprehensible horrors (delights?). In another, a boy builds a radio to communicate with his dead father across the fugue of dreams. And in “Alligator,” the eponymous piece and opener, the fridge becomes a microcosm for a form of writing as linguistic phenomenon. You could call the prose stylistic, in the same way a hurricane could be referred to as wind. One example: “what was left over would likely get lost in the refrigerator where things were perpetually being pushed behind more saved food, this striated order of aging and forgetting.”

The reliable heuristic seems to be “false starts.” Take the opener, “Alligator,” for example. The alligator referred to is first defined by what it isn’t: it’s not a child, with his alligator T-shirt, nor is it a dream in which the narrator watches himself as an alligator stands at the door. When the “real” alligator story is ultimately unearthed—and all of these stories read as a form of unearthing—it happens to also be the most mundane: a sighting on a swamp tour. “I don’t know that it meant much; sure, we weren’t used to seeing alligators, so there was that.” And then the story tells you even this, the real story, doesn’t capture the whole picture. And then David Ryan works his magic.

What this magic is defies conjecture. The mysticism at work is this: any time the audience is given a peek behind the curtain, a glimpse of the rabbit and the hat, a new element is introduced, which throws expectation off track. What is being evinced here is change, in all its myriad forms and surprises. From a webbing of story, what’s mapped is not so much a plotline but a feeling, which doubles back on itself without insisting, unfurls without pretensions and, when it finally hits, does so in ways utterly unexpected. Catastrophe becomes beauty. Pain, celebration.

Maybe it’s the cold-blooded throttling of cliché, as demonstrated in “Warp and Weft”—a 2022 O. Henry Prize Winner—which begins like this: “A construction worker falls from the thirty-fourth floor of a high-rise.” While he falls, he remembers his life in the blink of an eye. If this starts out like a cliché, read on. It ends up being anything but.

The cliché is dispelled in a single paragraph. Next, a crane operator trying to save the man crashes the crane and himself dies, this time in sparser, coarser language. And then the story really begins. It becomes not a tale of death, but the tale of several people woken by this travesty, and the psychic current which connects them all. An elderly woman dreaming of her own loss, a man contemplating suicide, a couple having inexpert sex are all jarred by the resonance of this accident, which becomes a sort of atmospheric permutation. At the end, the man’s own son slips into sleep, tragedy postponed while we, the readers, must sit with the telephone ringing inside our fragile hearts.

There are psychedelic pastiches that call to mind Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation. Nearly every story reads like Amy Hempel administering a Rorschach Test as a pass-fail examination. The reader is on the chopping block, and the signs don’t point to a positive outcome. Look no further than the apocalyptic “Apiary,” where an elderly couple’s involvement in a doomsday cult goes south, for confirmation of that fact.

But, for all the morality embedded within the stories, Ryan himself is not our judge. He isn’t interested in such a shallow disposition. He’s merely relating the facts of the story, and the judgement is what’s leftover when the sludge between the ears starts to overheat. These facts of Ryan’s come through crooked, distorted by dreams and mirrors and puffs of smoke that are oblique, mysterious, and chilling, but which also direct the fiction in ways so subtle they’re hardly noticed, until the reader is left peering into a puddle of milk, wondering where it all went wrong. Within these pages, the particular exists to eviscerate ethos. And those smallest, quietest particularities bring forth something else. Sometimes that thing is hope, and sometimes it’s despair. No matter what it is, however, it’s always magic.