I do enjoy a good short story collection, and make no mistake, this collection is a good one. The marketing blurb says that these tales are “the finger on the pulse of collective secrecy”, but they could just as easily be tagged as stories of alienation. Almost all of them feature protagonists in dysfunctional marriages; some could easily land in an anthology of horror stories, or of crime fiction. But when all is said and done, if you like good writing, you should buy this book when it goes up for sale January 4, 2016. Thank you to Net Galley, Biting Duck Press, and Boson Books for the DRC, which I was given in exchange for an honest review.

Usually a collection like this one features its best work first and last, but this time I don’t see it that way. The first one is decent, but there are occasional moments when the dialogue goes awry, becoming at times either awkward and pretentious, or like a mouthful of mashed potatoes. The story itself wasn’t bad, it was specifically the dialogue that didn’t sit quite right.

The second story made the entire collection worth having. “This Time Comes From That Time” is a story of a Vietnam veteran who’s gone to pieces and commenced digging his own tunneled command center beneath his grandmother’s home. The jumbled trauma of that time—the murders of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Junior; the war; demonstrations and riots that burned in cities across the nation—combine with the protagonist’s combat experience to leave him disoriented and seriously off kilter. Toss in some strangely comforting TV shows of the 1960’s, and the stew that Gardner makes of it is fascinating indeed. The prose is lean, the words well chosen. The man knows how to use figurative language like a champion; in particular, the use of repetition to drive the plot forward, to create a sense of urgency that is both visceral and memorable, is hard not to notice. At times it creates a take-me-to-church cadence that leaves the reader helplessly enthralled.

The titled selection was my second favorite, a story in which stone cold murder and every day irritations are juxtaposed in such a way as to leave a trail of shivers down even the most hardened reader’s spine. Yet there is also a place—I don’t want to give anything away, so I will refrain from being specific—in which a particularly obnoxious character’s comeuppance made me laugh out loud. This was made all the more amusing by the rapid way the author led us from the chamber of horrors to this brief, comedic moment, entirely unanticipated. And from there, things gradually chilled—even froze—not unlike the corpse in the story.

Gardner’s use of foreshadowing is sometimes predictable or mechanical, but at other times, it is used in the best way possible, building tension and suspense to the point where the reader has no option when the phone rings or a family member beckons, but to ignore them and keep on reading. “A Crime of Opportunity” is particularly strong in this respect, and was another favorite of mine.

Every single story in this anthology is hip-deep in booze. If you’re on the wagon right now and struggling, get yourself a different book.