If literary fiction exists in order to look under the surface of life and tell the truth about what it finds there-then the stories in Eternal Damnation do an extraordinary job.
These stories are quiet and thoughtful, their voices refusing to be made up of the tropes, images, and attitudes usually mistaken for "reality." Their characters may not see the expected things, but what they do see is clear and real, if cruelly so. A young girl experiences a magical sight and carries it with her for life-a span that then seems but a moment. A boy, in 1957, hears sixty years of history unfolded in one casually-spoken sentence. In "Losses," a man thinks back to three distant tragedies and fears that the most terrible thing about them may lie in their having no meaning. And stories like "Being Blind," "The Unspeakable," "Minutiae," "Small Potatoes," and "A Perfect Morning" look unflinchingly at the crimes and surrealisms of the Covid era.
From award-winning novelist Eric Larsen, stories that look under the surface of things, see the terror there-and keep looking.