I really love the idea that these stories are labeled as cinematic. AS you read you can actually see the stories played out in vignettes of film. They are so descriptive and full. A wonderful example of short stories done well.

CASCADE by Craig Davidson is a collection of seven stories based around his fictional town of Cataract City, a place similar to Niagara Falls.
These are stories that you will ponder over. Outcomes in suspension. Lives on the brink.
Some you will be compelled to tear through, wondering, needing to know what is going to happen. Others you will read because the writing style is so good that it doesn’t really matter what it’s about. The plot runs the gamut with stories about a mother struggling not to freeze to death, child protective services, love for an evil twin brother, to a guy with a manslaughter rap trying to play basketball.
The Ghost Lights was probably one of my favorite cold weather horror stories ever. It was gory, heartbreaking and bone chilling.

Craig Davidson's stories are definitely unique, but I just couldn't get interested in them. These are some long short stories, and boy are they hard to stick with. I think the problem for me was that you never knew where things were headed, what the point of the story was, and what the stakes were. There are mysteries, but you never got the sense that Davidson was going to resolve them, if the mystery was the point of the story, or if it was just the setting for the protagonists' (often boring) reflections. Style-wise, I found the stories overwritten, and Davidson has a tendency (which, to be fair, he shares with a lot of male writers these days) to mix in jargon and very technical professional argot in his figurative language. He's done a lot of research, but it's all more impressive than enjoyable.

I was sorely disappointed in this set of stories and had trouble moving past even the first one. They felt gratuitous, trite, and superficially written. Did not enjoy.

Not too long ago it seems everyone was talking about Saturday Night Ghost Club, a book I still haven’t read because our library stubbornly refuses to get a copy. But it certainly made me aware of the author, so when I found a collection of his short fiction on Netgalley, I was eager to check it out. And now I have. And now I no longer care that much about missing out on SNGC, though if you have a digital copy of that to lend, I’d be very appreciative.
Which is to say, I’m not in love with this, I didn’t hate it, it was very much a mixed bag. A mixed bag that displayed obvious and ample talent, but nevertheless didn’t quite wow.
These are pretty long short stories, so there are only six of them in this collection, all set in an imaginary Niagara adjacent Canadian place. It’s a pretty bleak place and these are pretty bleak stories. It didn’t immediately grab attention, but then the Vanishing Twin got closer and then there was a ridiculously dragged out basketball themed story that just about turned me off completely.
Davidson is great on details, bizarrely meticulous on details, in fact, which can work for some readers, but this one found the approach overwhelming. The author also tends to get too busy with the metaphors, often cramming one atop another until the entire thing is one giant impressionistic abstract. It’s meant to hit a certain tone on the heartstrings, but it doesn’t always succeed and as a writing technique it’s really overused here.
After that, the stories improved. A lot. Got much more interesting, more emotionally engaging, got more…Those stories didn’t just emotionally engage, they devastated, quietly, the way slow unfolding tragedies can, the way real life does.
And more often than not you can sift through all the stylistic embellishments and obscene amounts of details and technical lingo to the sheer beauty of narrative storytelling. In those moments the author would shine. And the appeal would be easily understood.
So not the easiest of reads. Nor is it as incendiary as the cover suggest, though fire is heavily featured. But an interesting read all the same. Something different. Something realistically surreal. Something very, very sad. Difficult to recommend outside of fans of tragically devastating slice of life stories, so read at your own discretion and ideally coordinate to an appropriate mood. Thanks Netgalley.