After the Flood

Greetings once again from the fictional upstate New York town of Two Rivers, location of Ben Tanzer's other two story collections with CCLaP, 2008's Repetition Patterns and 2011's So Different Now. In these new stories, the citizens of this Sam-Shepardesque village are facing the prospect of the "Storm of the Century" and a massive flash flood. Instead of nobly rising to the occasion, however, the characters featured in these intense, probing pieces struggle with the same limitations and poor choices that have haunted them throughout these collections, resulting in the type of portraits of alcoholism, abuse and infidelity we've come to expect from this dark master of the American small-town soul. A brilliantly metaphorical look at the Great Recession of the 2010s, and a fitting end to CCLaP's "Hypermodern" series of small handmade hardback books, this latest volume of the ongoing series by Tanzer is considered by many to be some of the best work of his career, and you are sure to be both moved and horrified by the results.