A Small Apocalypse

In her debut short story collection, Laura Chow Reeve seizes the familiar Florida landscape of postcards and headlines—and pries open spaces for unlikely affection and sun-soaked eeriness. A pair of queer friends make themselves at home on the banks of the Suwannee River. A family tragedy unfolds at Disney World. A hurricane floods a theater during an apocalyptic movie marathon. A flamingo meets an untimely end at the Jacksonville Zoo. A relationship falters, only in part due to one partner transforming into a reptile. Characters weave in and out of this collection’s fourteen stories, finding moments of intimacy with ghosts and moments of alienation from loved ones.

A Small Apocalypse is a gorgeously wrought exploration of what it means to exist in the in-between. Heavily steeped in the swampy, feral heat of Florida, its stories plum the joys and dissonances of queerness, hybridity, Asian American identity, and cultural inheritance, with an eye for both the uncanny and the nakedly true.