Wells Tower’s stories are desolate and uncompromising, but they have a blinding luminosity. The nine collected in his first book, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), all previously published in magazines such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Paris Review, are studies of the secret rage of people mired in mediocre circumstances. They depict the crushing banality of everyday existence and the myriad ways we attempt to cope with our failures, resentments, and delusions. In most cases, the solution is violence, making Tower feel at times like a modern-day Hemingway, drawn to characters who search for absolution through hunting trips, drunken brawls, and the wilderness. In the tense “Down Through the Valley,” a man vents his rage at his ex-wife’s new husband by, ironically, backing him in a nighttime fight in a parking lot. “Leopard,” a sharp example of second-person narration done right, is a fresh take on rebellion against a violent stepfather. Tower demonstrates such intimacy with the intricacies of repressed masculinity that it’s as a surprise when, in “Wild America,” the sole tale with a female protagonist, he proves himself just as comfortable exploring the psyche of a teenage girl willing to be with anyone who shows a hint of interest. And the title story, a tale of marauding Vikings which is Tower’s only departure from the world of contemporary anomie, confirms through its remoteness of era and place that alienation is as old as time itself.

KEYWORDS: books, literature, Wells Tower

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