The Nothing

<p><strong style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)><em>The Nothing</em></strong><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> Lauren Davis's debut fiction collection exists on the whisper between reality and illusion. Think Shirley Jackson's characters stuck in the damp Pacific Northwest or an Olympic Peninsula funhouse mirror held up to Karen Russell's </strong><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)><em>Florida</em></strong><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>. The worlds Davis creates acknowledge the terror and seek the gifts of solitude grief and the unrelenting thirst for certainty within us all.</strong></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>In</span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> The Nothing</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> Lauren Davis channels the eerie surrealism and biting social critique of Aimee Bender and Ramona Ausubel though these folktales are all her own. Each story fractures expectation and then gathers up what's left creating a bricolage of the uncanny. Shadows cannot be caught Davis writes but here she has done just that-harnessed the lingering traces of The Real and reanimated them. Morphed by nostalgia grief and the strangeness of desire in all its forms Davis's stories are tiny portals through the mundane into something fresher and truer and thus more beautiful.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>-Lindsey Drager author of </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Avian Hourglass</em></p>