Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids: Stories

What do we owe our family and friends in times of wild uncertainty?

That’s the question the women of Leyna Krow’s beguiling, darkly fabulist story collection grapple with as they strive to be good mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, wives, and companions in a world that is constantly shifting around them. Set in the Pacific Northwest, these stories blend high concept magic with the sometimes subtle, other times glaring, realities of climate change.

As protagonists contend with doppelgänger babies, hordes of time travelers, mysterious portals, and supernatural siblings, there lurks in the background the effects of the region’s rapidly shifting environment. There are wildfires, wind storms, unrelenting heat, disrupted butterfly migration patterns, a new plague, and a catastrophe on the slopes of Mount Rainier that reverberates through three generations of a single family over the course of a half dozen linked stories.

With Krow’s signature blend of sardonic whimsy and unsettling insight, Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids imagines the rules to be broken, choices to be made, and even crimes to be had for the sake of the people, and places, we love.

Leyna Krow is the author of the novel Fire Season, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the short story collection I’m Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking, which was a Believer Book Award finalist. She lives in Spokane, Washington, with her husband and two children.