![]() ![]() In “Manifest,” Bernadette’s seemingly plot-instigating encounter with a man with “movie-star good looks” in the plastic surgeon’s office is left behind as the story veers toward an exploration of her determined isolation. More often, however, the stories nudge up against confrontational situations that they then allow to dissipate. Sometimes they expand into gleeful expressions of the macabre, as in “Get Back,” an unrepentant litany of gruesome deaths narrated by the succubuslike murderer herself or in “Strange Loop,” where the ex-con main character, John, “forget the trembling urges he kept in check” through his total immersion in taxidermy. ![]() ![]() ![]() Sometimes this uneasiness is the palpable result of external forces, as in “Don’t Let’s,” in which a woman seeking solitude in the aftermath of an assault may or may not be haunted by a boo hag. Jemc’s ( The Grip of It, 2017, etc) stories revel in disquiet. Twenty short stories about people in the muted extremes of ordinary lives. ![]()
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