Before leaving on holiday, I reviewed (at Necessary Fiction) Patrick Michael Finn’s excellent collection of short stories, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet:

The eight stories in Patrick Michael Finn’s collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, are so thematically and stylistically cohesive they create a story collection that reads very much like a novel. These are not linked stories, not in the traditional sense; they do not share characters or even strict time periods. But they do share Finn’s rigorously consistent narrative style, his delight in intense sensory description and a firm geographic anchor in the city of Joliet, Illinois.

Together, these miniature novels create an unsettling fictional world of mid-western America, a detailed and vivid narrative rendering of the outcome of the area’s immigrant, industrial and social history.

I make it very clear in the review how much I enjoyed this collection. Finn’s writing is wonderfully consistent and although his narrative voice transforms itself for each story to create a unique perspective or voice, it also maintains a really satisfying stylistic harmony. Also, these are long stories. Stories that take time to get through, that draw you inside a detailed and complicated world. Each piece felt like it could easily be expanded into a full-length novel and I loved that about each one.

Find the full review here.