A Ben Marcus short story has a specific signature: spotlighting the unspoken discomforts of our everyday lives with brutal honesty adorned with beautiful sentence-level craft, It's an irresistible combination that makes you want to keep reading.

Each story here is so well-written and every theme so insightfully and thoughtfully presented that all the darkness is worth wading through. I'd read 'Cold Little Bird' in The New Yorker and got this collection on the strength of that story. Not all of the ones here measure up to that former work. But each story rewards the reader with some kind of payoff or the other and, for that, the book is well worth the time.

[Full review forthcoming at PopMatters. I'll add a link then.]