How's that jumper shot of yours? Still silky? I'm coaching the Cascades. Up in Niagara Falls? Scrappy unit. Couple of intriguing kids.
I'm not a dedicated consumer of short stories, but when I read one that fires up a certain frisson in my brain – a sudden connection to my lived experience that makes me think that the story couldn't possibly have been told any other way – then I consider that to be well-written; it's a totally subjective evaluation, based on a physical, rather than some theory-backed intellectual, reaction. And the stories in Craig Davidson's Cascade simply didn't fire me up. Primarily set in Davidson's fictional stand-in for Niagara Falls, Ontario (Cataract City), the “cascade” of the title references the mighty waterfall, the basketball team in that opening quote, but most importantly, these stories seem to focus on moments of decision or action – the brief equipoise of events before they succumb to the brink – and the results that cascade from those moments. These stories were all interesting, but other than a couple of brief emotional connections, they didn't do much for me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.) The stories:
The Ghost Lights
You were born into dread, my son. Dan said this one night in the witching hour, alone in Charlie's nursery, his voice clear over the monitor in our bedroom. He was right: to have a baby is to be introduced to a depthless well of worry. A dread you could never have guessed at, not in a thousand years.A car accident on a lonely stretch of snow-covered backroad begins a quest for survival that transforms a new mother's relationship with her son. Nice build of tension that had me choked up at the end.
One Pure Thing
Many things can be built into one moment. Later, you might have lots of time to tease apart the strands of instinct and causation in search of catharsis or clarity, and if you do, you will find that entwined in those strands are the people and places and events that brought you to that point, guiding you to that heartbeat where everything coming before acted on everything yet to come. Human lives can be ruthlessly reduced to such moments, I think. And once they pass, we have to exist with what we've earned inside them.The story from which the collection's title derives, semi-pro basketball is used as a microcosm for examining life; lots of (unfamiliar to me) basketball jargon is organically sprinkled throughout – adding interest and credibility – and enjoyably builds to the tension of “the big game”.
The Vanishing Twin
You can never guess the change your life might take until that change comes. That's what Charlie says – well, Charlie says until that change darkens your door, which is classic Charlie-talk but anyway, that's what he says and I believe him.The story opens on a pair of fifteen-year-old fraternal twins and their lives in a juvenile correction facility, and as the narrative progresses, it becomes apparent that a long ago womb and fraternal love is about all the brothers have in common. Creepy good.
Friday Night Goon Squad
It had begun as a morbid joke – sometimes those were the ones that got you through. “Child apprehension with officer assist,” a.k.a.: the Friday Night Goon Squad. You hatch'em, we snatch'em.There's a sad irony to this story of a burnt out Social Worker, who has been having trouble conceiving, working hard to safely keep kids in less-than-ideal family situations.
Medium Tough
There's an instant in any procedure when you understand that you hold everything in your hand. The God Moment. Each surgeon feels it differently. For me, this was a moment of awesome, near-paralyzing love. Love for the child beneath my blade: for its life and its capacity to do great things – or if not great, then merely valuable. And it was a moment of respect for their bodies, which I must invade, and for their futures, which I am dutybound to honour.An oddly carnivalesque tale of a man whose mother's gestational alcoholism led to his being born bifurcated – the left half of his body withered but nimble-fingered enough to become a surgeon, while his right side has the beefed-up super-musculature that makes him a champion arm-wrestler – and the story explores these doubling ideas of twinning, before-and-after, cause-and-effect. (Highlighting that these same themes were seen in earlier stories and the Social Worker from Friday Night Goon Squad makes [what seems to be a somewhat out-of-character] reappearance.)
Firebugs
Fire will grunt and growl and come at you with the soft slithering of a snake. It'll howl around blind corners like a pack of wolves, and gibber up from flame-eaten floorboards and reverberate in a million other strange ways besides. Sometimes it sounds like buzzard talons clawing across pebbled glass. Other times, it'll come for you silent as a ghost: a soft whisper of smoke curling back under a doorway, beckoning you to open it. That's when it's most dangerous – when it's hiding its true face.A fire investigator is flummoxed by a plague of arson ravaging his town: Should he be looking for an individual or a group? Should he delve further into a story of someone who found himself in a trance of pyromania? Or should he be rerouting his investigation closer to home? An intriguing story with some interesting philosophical bits.
