Author: Jennifer Graham

(G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 270 pages)

When I was a kid, each October I scoured the library shelves, looking for children’s books about Halloween, like the new one by LeBron James. It was part of the fun of the spooky season. So it’s delightful to find grown-up Halloween fare, like Micaiah Johnson’s The Unhaunting.

Described by one writer as a cross between the work of Shirley Jackson and Toni Morrison, The Unhaunting signals that this is not your traditional fare with its cover illustration: a spooky-looking house surrounded by creatures that look like bats until you realize they are butterflies — which Johnson later reveals to be moths. The Addams Family this is not. But it’s a genuinely spooky tale about a haunted house, with complex underlying themes (“There is an undercurrent in this book cautioning us to be careful about making a home in institutions or people that love you for the wrong reasons,” the author says in the acknowledgments).

“A house, itself, is nothing. It’s not a shelter until it is sheltering someone. Not a home until it is digesting a family. It is an empty theoretical. A house is a house fire, waiting for its match. A house is a ghost story, waiting for its death,” the novel begins.

The house in The Unhaunting is a two-story Civil-War era home with aged carpet the color of wine, bizarrely wallpapered throughout with scenes of duck hunting. The house has been left to Avery Abernathy after the death of a cousin, and he has convinced his best friend since childhood, Shantell, to move there with him to fix it up.

Avery and Shantell, despite their close bond, couldn’t be more different. Avery comes from money and enjoys a worldview informed by that. Shantell’s worldview is informed by loss. Her father died in military service, her brother was killed by police, and her mother died by suicide. She suffers from anxiety and agoraphobia. She can’t imagine anyone leaving her a whole house: “For Shantell, death had meant debt. Her father’s death had cost them their house in the city, and her mother’s funeral had taken two years to pay off. Imagine getting money when you lose someone. She’d be a millionaire.”

Avery has his own anxieties, including a fear of heights and a complicated relationship with his often unpleasant and sometimes cruel brother, Tobias. But Tobias is a contractor, and so he, too, has been invited to help renovate the house.

As the trio move in and start working on the house, it becomes clear that the house is quite strange and possibly home to one or more ghosts. It has an attic with no visible entry point. Markings on the wall that indicate children’s growth have an unexplained date related to Avery. And a first-person voice that occasionally addresses the reader appears not to be a friendly Casper-like presence but something much more sinister — if we can trust it. (“I’m not used to telling the truth,” the voice says at one point.)

Whatever the being is — it will be a while before its provenance becomes clear — it is evil and smart. Reflecting on Tobias, it says, “There was a time when he would have been my favorite. I’ve always found use for a blunt instrument, and a person with calloused knuckles attached to a damaged heart is capable of nearly anything. But these days I crave encounters more satisfying than ending lives…. Murder is an unsatisfying harvest. It only happens once. Conversion is a bit better; they kill themselves in little ways a million times before the end.”

The appearance of what seems to be a ghost and the disappearance of a swarm of moths that were at the house when Shantell and Avery first arrived don’t drive them away, however. A local tour guide tells them cryptically, “Nothing bad ever happens in the big house,” which seems oddly enough to be true. The old house and its inhabitants seemed to have escaped troubles that had plagued others in the town; even its walls are oddly unmarked under all the wallpaper. Yet when Avery’s girlfriend, Emily, arrives, she remarks, “Oh wow. You weren’t lying about the ghosts. This place is … heavy.”

It is heavy not only with what is happening in real time but what has taken place in the past. We realize that the otherworldly presence has been watching Shantell since long before the day she showed up at the house, that it is obsessed with her, and that the ghosts of slavery still hang over the region. The mystery of the house, as is gradually revealed, is one that was created by design.

“No one comes to a ghost story looking for survivors,” the being that is the narrator says at one point. Similarly, don’t look to a haunted house for a happy ending, but in this case, at least there’s a satisfying one. B+

Featured Photo: The Unhaunting, by Micaiah Johnson

(HarperOne, 320 pages)

The business of burying a loved one is much different in Greece than in America. Because of the country’s size, there isn’t enough land to bury everyone, and so people typically rent grave sites for a few years, just long enough to allow for the decomposition of the body. Then, the bones are exhumed and interred in a building called a charnel house.

The writer s.e. smith grew up in Greece and had a father who thought a visit to a charnel house was a good way to pass time with a child.

“The ossuary was a tumble of boxes, some of which were actively breaking open or losing their plaques, decorated with moss and small plants if they were close to the entrance, green tendrils yearning for the sun,” smith writes. “It had a dark, earthy scent, thick under your tongue, an old-bone smell that I sometimes catch on the wind thousands of miles and decades away.”

Such is the promising beginning to All My Dead Cats and Other Losses, a meditation on“practicing good grief in a culture that fears mourning.” A lifelong lover of cats, the author frames the book around the instructive passing of an eclectic assortment of cats, then uses each story as a springboard to investigate some aspect of death, American style. “Each unique death told me something about myself and the culture I live in, even as it felt like the world passed me by, missing the moment,” smith writes.

There was, for example, Sofie the Sofa Cat, smith’s first cat, who became an important part of the author’s childhood after their parents separated, “becoming a constant in an inconstant life.” Sofie was hit by a car one day while smith was at school, and their father inexplicably gave the cat’s corpse to the driver who hit her for burial, which denied the chance for ceremony and closure. “Sofie was simply there in the morning and gone in the afternoon, but not gone in a definitive way that I could see and feel.”

From there, smith goes on to discuss, with reporting and interviews with various people, how children grieve and the ways in which we fail them by insulating them from death. “You do not forget your first dead body — human or animal — and the sense of absence that it projects, the spark of whatever made it alive gone, leaving something inert and somehow smaller than it was before. At any age it’s a jarring event. Does that mean it is one that should be avoided, shrouded in mystique? Or is it a moment in which children should be invited to participate — if they want — to ground their understanding of death in something present, real, and concrete?”

The quick and unexpected death of a cat named Mr. Bell allows smith to consider how sudden deaths affect us differently from drawn-out ones — “the freak event that forever changes our lives: the riptides and falls, the heart attack while mowing the lawn, the senior cat who has a seizure after a brief period of feeling unwell.”

In this chapter, smith leans into a lecture mode only hinted at previously, noting, for example, how “medical racism” is in part to blame for higher incidence of cardiac deaths among Black Americans, and how “structural inequalities” determine which people work in dangerous jobs. Both assertions may well be true, but the digression, and other similar ones that betray the author’s political leanings, detract from the overlying theme of “we’re all on a march to the grave” and need to better support each other in times of grief. It’s a small quibble, but one that some readers will note and dislike.

Beyond that, the transitions between dead-cat anecdotes and reporting are sometimes jarring, a departure from the lyrical and memorable writing that the author is clearly capable of. Smith’s story of witnessing the euthanasia of a cat named Leila can bring you to tears, and their subsequent musing on guilt associated with a death is tender and thoughtful. “We can poke and prod the dying seemingly indefinitely, if we want. We forget, sometimes, that just because you can doesn’t mean that you should, and that what is true for you, and works for you, is not universal.”

Then, we’re suddenly talking about the Affordable Care Act and spiritualism, and then encounter a sentence that looks like it was dropped into the book by an errant Walmart drone: “Even today, experimenting with Ouija boards is a classic rite of passage.”

Is it really? Who knows? Can you get back to Leila, please?

“But I digress” is a punchline, but it is all too often a stop sign in this otherwise beautiful book.

The author also digresses in a difficult-to-read chapter on volunteering at an animal shelter, discussing animals that are put down despite the prevalence of “no kill” shelters in the United States. But smith, who preserved pieces of their dead cats in urns and memorial jewelry, does a yeoman’s job in exploring the many layers of “It’s just a cat” — the central mystery of why an animal’s death affects people the way it does.

“He was just a cat. But also, he was a whole world,” the author writes while recounting a frantic trip to the animal emergency room with a cat named Loki howling in pain. “I am not alone in feeling like a bad person, or a cold one, for being more affected by the death of an animal than that of a human.”

All My Dead Cats and Other Losses is a very good book that could have been great with a bit more time and some strategic editing. As for the absence of dogs, dog lovers, do not worry; you will find community and solace here as well. B+

Featured Photo: All My Dead Cats and Other Losses, by s.e. smith

(MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 281 pages)

Some books take a while to grow on you; some endear themselves right from the start. The latter was my experience with Nathaniel Rich’s Cloudthief, a witty and smart crime novel with a deceivingly dull cover that does it no favors.

The protagonist is Tim, a freelance climate journalist in New York City, struggling to make ends meet by writing articles for magazines that pay by the word. He is “pathologically nonthreatening: not too tall, not too strong, not too quick, not too surprising, and not at all noticeable. Strangers were deeply unintimidated by me.”

After student-loan payments, health insurance and rent, he clears about $20,000, “enough for a weekly burrito, a monthly bender, a quarterly taxi.” When things are especially tough, as they are when we meet him, he rents out his tiny apartment for the night while he crashes on a friend’s couch.

But the night Tim is about to bunk with his friend Ces, Ces has other ideas. A brilliant eccentric whose main job is designing web pages, he’s hatched a plan to break into mini-storage units in Manhattan and steal anything of value in order to sell it. Tim is dubious but Ces has rented one of the storage units, so it’s not technically breaking and entering to enter the facility. So Tim follows along, guiltily aware that he is now, “according to the letter of the New York City Administrative Code, a misdemeanant.”

But things will get worse. And, as Tim muses, “The guilt, as with any sin, felt most acute at first occurrence. Each subsequent commission, no matter how severe, did not intensify the original guilt. Each crime alleviated it.”

Tim and Ces will part ways when they encounter a woman living in one of the storage units. Virginia has arranged her unit to lock from the inside, and she only goes outside for a few hours each night, when no one will notice her odd comings and goings.

Tim, still more journalist than thief, is intrigued and convinces Virginia to let him come in and interview her about her life, why she chose it and how she pulls it off, telling her (and himself) that it would be a great magazine story. But they become more than interviewer and subject, and together hatch a plan to pull off a much greater heist than breaking into mini-storage units. They decide to break into a data center near Tulsa, Oklahoma, and steal its most valuable data, an act they justify because of (a) the evil that technology companies perpetuate by collecting and selling our data and tracking us and (b) they are so desperate and broke.

Virginia is broke because she has chosen to take herself completely offline in order to escape from Big Tech’s all-knowing eye. She’s mastered the art of hiding not only from people but from Google, having realized that the best way to assure anonymity is to create lots of you’s. She also has acquired a lot of skills that will come in handy as she and Tim enact their plan.

Tim’s situation is more sympathetic. His financial struggles, aside from having low income in a high-cost city, are exacerbated by the fact that he is financially responsible for his sister, named Zoe, who has a genetic disease causing her to progressively lose her hearing and sight. Their parents are out of the picture, and Zoe is still able to live on her own, but both brother and sister know that at some point she is going to need full-time care.

All of this is happening in an America that is increasingly feeling the effects of a warming planet, which both Tim and Virginia refer to as “the Collapse.” Both are increasingly nihilistic, which enables them to easily make decisions that would have given others pause. They are also convinced that they can pull off the heist because of poor security in rural states. As Tim explains to Zoe, “This treasure trove is just sitting there. In giant empty warehouses surrounded by cornfields.”

Several perspective-shifting twists propel the story forward, as if a data-center heist isn’t enough to hold our attention. But the most compelling part about Cloudthief is how intelligent it is. Rich doesn’t assume that we know anything about data centers or how technology tracks us, but he explains everything in a way that is not insulting to readers. (One exception: how he uses initials to ostensibly disguise actual companies — as if we don’t know what G. and M. mean — although to be fair, the publisher’s legal team might have made that decision.) The dialogue between characters, even minor ones, is snappy and smart, and everything about the story seems thoughtful, from the contrast between mini-storage units and vast data centers, to the rich symbolism offered in a book that both Virginia and Tim treasure, a memoir by a French woman who spent 111 days in an underground cave.

And the data-center break-in, as it turns out, is but a prelude to another crime, which takes place in Boston and again, pivots the story in an unforeseen way.

Cloudthief is a story of descent, both societal and individual, and although it tries to leave us with a sense of hope, not everyone will experience it that way. Still, it’s the rare novel that will equally appeal to both women and men, and even rarer, teach you how to live in a storage unit, if that’s on your bucket list. B+

Featured Photo: Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich

(Berkley, 373 pages)

You’d never know it from the title, but Tessa Yang’s The Jellyfish Problem is a good, old-fashioned ghost story, the kind to lose yourself in on chilly weekends in October when you’re not out pumpkin spicing or leaf peeping. It’s a bit fantastical, as ghost stories usually are, and asks us to care a bit too much about an invertebrate that lacks a brain and heart. But this is a mystery/thriller informed by marine science, and we will learn about jellyfish whether we want to or not. The author, Tessa Yang, clearly intends for us to appreciate jellyfish more after reading her debut novel, but that may not be the effect.

Dr. Jo Ness is a marine biologist who has been obsessed with jellyfish since childhood, when she came across one at the beach and admired “a raw gray thing slouched on the sand like an angel’s lung dropped from heaven.” All grown up now, she worked her way into a job at a struggling aquarium where she tends jellyfish in the first, tiny stages of life while working on a book about jellyfish with her best friend — a brash South American scientist named Aldo who has a remarkable resistance to animal venom.

Jo, who always said she liked jellyfish more than people, made an exception for Aldo, but he died in a scuba accident seven months ago, and Jo is still mourning. They were diving together but became separated in poor visibility, and Jo is wracked by the sense that she was responsible for Aldo’s death.

His loss was the second blow since she finished college: The first was becoming estranged from her college best friend, Nadia, a woman with whom she thought she had the makings of a romantic relationship. But Nadia went AWOL after commencement and they haven’t spoken in 11 years. She knows nothing about Jo’s current life other than that she had been obsessed with jellyfish. Then she unexpectedly calls and tells Jo she is living on an island off the coast of Maine and that they have a “jellyfish problem.”

Nadia doesn’t offer much more information and admits she hasn’t seen the creature herself. But Jo, listless and miserable since Aldo’s death, has plenty of accrued leave and books a cross-country flight, interested not only in the mysterious jellyfish but also in the possibility of rekindling her relationship with Nadia, or at least learning why it abruptly ended.

What she finds there, however, is nothing she expected. Nadia is happily married and nowhere to be found. The jellyfish is singular, not plural. It is said to be a massive, brightly colored, luminescent creature that appears for three days at the time of the full moon and has a strange effect on the locals who see it. They regard the jellyfish as not a fascinating object of study but a literal sea monster, the kind that Jo’s Japanese mother used to tell her stories about when she was a child.

Complicating matters is the geographic isolation of Shattering Point, “800 acres of spruce forest and granite shorelines and bracing, choppy waters that deter all but the gutsiest swimmers.” Twenty-two miles off the Maine coast, the island is reachable by ferry twice a week, but only during the summer season. Other times, to get on or off the island, you have to take an air taxi or catch a ride with the mail boat, which only goes out once a week.

Even though the island relies on tourists during the summer, Jo is not universally welcomed. Some of the islanders are hostile to her, and as she tries to find Nadia and unravel the mystery of the jellyfish, which the people of Shattering Point call Clementine, there is a bitter divide about what should be done about the jellyfish. The danger is not exaggerated or imagined: People are physically affected by even seeing Clementine, and one man has to be hospitalized.

That said, Clementine is not the ghost of this story, but an apparition that Jo begins seeing, which she understands to be a yōkai, a supernatural being that her mother used to tell her about.

The relationship Jo has with her mother is one of the many layers in the story: Her father, who used serve as an intermediary of sorts between mother and daughter, is dead, and their relationship is both distant and fraught, in part because the mother is resistant to her daughter’s sexual orientation and had been hoping that Jo would marry Aldo.

Each chapter of The Jellyfish Problem begins with an excerpt of the book that Jo and Aldo were writing, which serves not only to only impart jellyfish information but also to give us a glimpse of the closeness between the two. The conversation in the document’s editing notes grows poignant over time, and Jo begins to speak to her dead friend in editing mode, as if hoping he could see it. It’s a small but smart thing that Yang does to break up a novel that can feel overly long at times, especially when the suspension of disbelief is called for repeatedly.

When the explanation of everything arrives, it is — well, let’s just go with unusual: perhaps not wholly satisfying, but consistent with the novel’s intelligent foundation and supernatural overlay. The quirkiness of the story, however, is eclipsed by the gorgeous writing. Yang has the voice of a poet and hardly a page goes by without some elegant sentence construction that makes you take note of its grace. Give her bonus points, also, for assigning a cameo role to the University of New Hampshire. Wildcats beat jellyfish every time. A

Featured Photo: The Jellyfish Problem, by Tessa Yang

(MCD, 240 pages)

Cory Doctorow writes with a cynic’s eye about the frontiers of technology, with titles including Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, Chokepoint Capitalism and How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. Although he is primarily a writer of science fiction, he has opinions about how technology is changing society for the worse, and he scratches the itch to share those opinions with a popular newsletter and short books that double as grouchy sermons. Last year’s Enshittification is a good example: It’s about “why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it.”

He’s back with something that reads like a sequel and brings to mind the old meme about honey badgers that don’t care. Doctorow doesn’t care if the titans of AI don’t like him. He doesn’t care if his clunky, insider-trading title repels potential readers. He doesn’t care if they sit, blinking, while he expounds on the minutiae of tech. He has stuff to get off chest.

For starters, the hype surrounding AI. Doctorow sees it as driven by “growth” businesses (meaning companies like Uber and Lyft, whose worth is calculated not by their current profitability but by their forecast growth) and companies that gleefully see dollar signs in every employee they can let go. “Your boss almost certainly loves AI. Bosses will not shut up about AI,” Doctorow writes.

That’s because, according to Doctorow, there is something of a symbiotic relationship between garden-variety employers and the tech overlords, with each one feeding the other. Tech companies need hype about AI to sustain the illusion of growth, which in turn balloons their profits; once a company is no longer seen as “growing,” it becomes what is known as a “mature” company. “If you’re holding a lot of stock in a growth company, you can certainly enjoy the ride up, but you need to sleep with one eye open and one fist poised over the sell button.”

He offers Meta, circa January 2022, as an example. The company reported “less growth,” which led to a $230 billion devaluation over the next 24 hours, the largest in history. Moreover, because stock options are a large part of the compensation of tech executives, they are not just professionally but personally invested in the market’s perception that the company is growing. This is among the reasons that Doctorow believes, “Even by the standards of tech bubbles, the AI bubble is a whopper.”

The title of the book derives from the tech-bros’ use of the word “centaur,” which in Greek mythology is a creature that is half man, half horse. In the tech world (and in automation theory), a centaur is a human aided by a machine; a reverse centaur, then, according to Doctorow, is a “human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine.” The “conscripted” part matters. Doctorow is no Luddite; he welcomes AI that is legitimately helpful to a human end; he has used, for example, an OpenAI technology called Whisper that can transcribe and search through downloaded audio, even though he calls the company behind Whisper “grossly overhyped and terrible.”

But there is a segment of the population who aren’t getting to choose how to use AI, but having AI foist upon them for aims that don’t sit well with Doctorow’s democratic-socialist heart. The plight of the Amazon worker comes up a lot, as does the perceived threat to the livelihood of a wide range of artists.

It’s not that the threat is entirely unsupported.

Feed a chatbot the storyline of any popular movie with a couple of key changes and it will spit out an entire screenplay in minutes. And unlike human writers, who are prone to complaining and striking and resisting changes ordered by producers and directors, the chatbot is serenely compliant. But Doctorow explains why the AI product is usually so unsatisfying: The product of any artist — from a novel to a sculpture to a symphony — is the physical representation of a “big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling” in the artist’s mind, an idea the artist wants to convey. AI, on the other hand, “has no feelings, so it has no feelings to transmit,” and that hollowness comes through in the finished product.

All that said, AI is in its infancy and will improve, and does improve, according to the complexity of prompts it is given. And Doctorow writes all this cognizant that when photography emerged there were people who said it was hollow when compared to a painting, as was the reproduction of sound when compared to a live musical performance. (He notes that the famous composer John Philip Sousa was enraged when people started recording his music and distributing it; he warned about the “menace of mechanical music” and complained to Congress, “Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day.”)

And yet the problem is not so much that AI is flawed and soulless as it is that AI is being manipulated by capitalistic cartels, Doctorow believes, and so The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is very much a socialist manifesto that may not sit well with some whose political ideology runs counter to his. But there is a strong and growing backlash to AI even among fervent capitalists, so there will be an appetite for his recommended solutions “to strike at the source of AI’s power” by raging against the AI machine and its bitter, everyday fruits, like surveillance pricing.

Doctorow is a compelling writer and one of the most interesting thinkers in the world of technology, as such, worth paying attention to as we figure out what’s happening around us, and to us, as AI proliferates. In a world of reverse centaurs, be a centaur, is his message du jour. B+

Featured Photo: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, by Cory Doctorow

(Alfred A. Knopf, 234 pages)

Richard Russo labors in the shadow of another Maine novelist who shall go unnamed. He’s the only one of the two who has won a Pulitzer Prize, which Russo was awarded in 2002 for Empire Falls, a story about people caught in the grip of an economically struggling town in Maine.

Russo’s latest, Under the Falls, has a similar theme, but with a different origin story. He began writing with the intention of its being a TV series, but the project fell apart during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, and so he recast it as a novel — lucky for us. The book, as they say, is a page turner, a sophisticated one that explores the limits and obligations of childhood friendships, and the hold that a home town can have on a person even after they leave it.

The main character, Tyler Sinclair, left his home town, Stone Mountain, when he turned 18, taking nothing with him but clothes, a guitar and a little money he’d swiped from his dad. He left behind a dysfunctional home — his father had been physically abusive to Tyler’s mother and verbally abusive to the both of them — and also a circle of close friends. When Tyler left, he didn’t say goodbye to anyone, and he didn’t respond when those friends tried to reach him later.

Eighteen years later Tyler is a celebrity, the lead singer of a band named after his home town. Some of his most famous songs are about things that had happened at Stone Mountain, including one called “The Long Fall” that is evocative of a tragedy that befell one of Tyler’s childhood friends. That friend, nicknamed Doc, became paraplegic after an accident that Tyler was involved with. Doc still lives in Stone Mountain, as does Tyler’s long-ago best friend, Curt, and as Under the Falls opens, Tyler is reluctantly headed to Stone Mountain with his band, having been booked to play a fundraising concert for Doc, without his consent or knowledge.

As unhappy as he is about going back to Stone Mountain, Tyler sees it as a one-and-done. He’ll have an uncomfortable, on-camera reunion with Doc — the band’s manager had contacted a local TV station seeking publicity for the band’s first show after the pandemic — and then play a concert at his old high school and return to his comfortable post-Stone Mountain life. Tyler’s parents have passed, so there’s no family drama to navigate, just the awkwardness of seeing former friends who had not escaped the town and did not enjoy his success.

The conversation with Doc goes better than Tyler expected — his old friend has made the most of his post-accident circumstances and is able to drive, using a tricked-out hearse modified for his use. But after the camera and lights are turned off, the conversation takes a serious turn, with the topic of blame for Doc’s accident coming up. Doc assures Tyler that he doesn’t blame him, but says not everyone in the town feels that way. And the bad feelings aren’t just about the accident, but about Tyler’s success. “It’s not just that you made all that money. It’s that you made it writing songs about us. About our lives,” Doc tells Tyler.

The sense of dread that Tyler had about returning to Stone Mountain turns out to be prescient. There’s a huge turnout for the event, and at first it’s like every other concert — an exuberant, appreciative crowd. But then there is a shocking announcement and the tone drastically changes, setting into motion a series of events that will upend Tyler’s life and those of his friends.

The trajectory is dark, and as it unfolds we vault from one perspective to another, including those of Curt, Tyler’s closest childhood friend who is now Stone Mountain’s chief of police, and Deb, a young officer whose good heart and honest questions about what happened that day threatens to unravel lives. The story moves fast and packs an emotional punch.

Tyler and the people of Stone Mountain aren’t necessarily likeable; Russo didn’t develop his characters deeply enough for us to feel comfortable picking sides. We get information about the characters’ back stories on a “need to know” basis. His decision to give one lesser character a MAGA hat and a presence at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot is curious, as these details aren’t relevant to what transpires at Stone Mountain and could alienate some readers. In fact, I’m not sure that dating the story in any way was a good choice — the Covid-19 pandemic keeps coming up in this and other recent novels, in a soon-to-be wearisome way.

Russo’s latest resonates not because of its modern touchpoints and questions but because of old ones: How do dynamics change between childhood friends over time? What do we owe our friends and family members if we achieve financial success and they don’t? Is it ethical to walk away from a bad situation, leaving others in it, without explanation? And Under the Falls is an exploration of how small missteps over the course of a lifetime can lead to enormous regret. As one of Tyler’s friends muses, the circle of friends were all “good people” decades earlier, and yet what happens the day of the benefit concert, and its aftermath, suggests that at least some of them aren’t now.

“No way to uneat the apple,” Russo writes, positing a double meaning for the titular falls. Stone Mountain was never Eden, not for Tyler or for his friends, but like every small town and large city, it was a breeding ground for the best and worst of human impulses. Their struggles are our own, writ large. And the 2023 writers’ strike notwithstanding, they’d still make for a great TV series. B+

Featured Photo: Unseen, by David Lewis and Keelan Leyser.