Cascade Stories

The six tales in Davidson's wonderful and gritty collection return to the bucolic backdrop of Cataract City, a stand-in for Niagara Falls (and the title of Davidson's earlier novel). Energized by a familial bond and propelled by tragedy, the opener, "The Ghost Lights," depicts the frenzied rush of a car crash's survivors. That bloodline bond hinges and anchors other stories where family runs deep regardless of occupation or circumstance, as in "The Vanishing Twin," in which two teenage twin brothers trade stories of their "devilry" from inside the walls of a juvenile correctional facility and realize just how different they are from each other. The struggles of a burned-out social worker in the emotionally resonant "Friday Night Goon Squad" are palpable as she attempts to assuage her clients' family issues while desperately trying to start a family of her own. A circus performer and a firefighter in "Medium Tough" and "Firebug" have their respective crosses to bear, and Davidson portrays each vividly. Throughout, the author displays deep empathy and conveys emotional resonance. The result is a blissful, wholly satisfying assemblage of cinematic stories, sure to please Davidson's fans and attract newcomers. (Oct.)

Disquieting stories that explore how people's lives can be upended in a single moment. Davidson, who also writes horror novels under the pen name Nick Cutter, does not shy away from looking point-blank at tragedy and the human propensity for cruelty. "The Ghost Lights" opens with the narrator blinking open her eyes. She's hanging upside down in her car, her husband dead beside her, his neck severed by a tree branch. In the back seat her baby is "a pocket-sized executioner with a white hood over his face." In "One Pure Thing," a pro basketball player's career ends when he climbs into the stands and punches a heckling fan, who falls down the stairs, hits his head, and winds up dying. "The Burn" slowly unfolds what happened to a Marine while he was serving in Iraq and shows how this past shapes his relationship with a high school girl recovering from a brain tumor. While these stories spotlight big, dramatic moments, Davidson's real gift is for closely observing small actions, like the mechanics of a big man driving toward the basketball hoop or a woman trying to unlock the door of a crashed car or a Marine helping a girl with disabilities sit on a toilet. Defamiliarization is the art of making the familiar new; Davidson's prose takes the unfamiliar--the extraordinary, whether good or bad--and makes it an embodied experience. You feel it in your bones. The final pieces are mostly concerned with how children must live with their parents' choices: In one, a surgeon is physically malformed because his mother drank while she was pregnant with him, while in another, a child-services worker confronts everything from negligent to evil parenting and concludes that "some people shouldn't be parents." Chilling tales of misfits and misfortune by a masterful writer. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.