The 11 stories that make up Caitlin Horrocks's debut collection are distinct, but loneliness, love and guilt ache through each of them. A teenager held captive by her mother's illness befriends an Amish girl. A young, desperate teacher controls her third graders with unscrupulous methods as the classroom animals sicken and die. On a cruise ship held captive by Somali pirates, a Midwestern mother dutifully writes postcards to her severely disabled son, who will never be able to read them.
But the standout of the collection is "Steal Small," a slow-creeping chiller of a story narrated by the young wife of a man who sells dogs for medical experiments on the sly. The two of them steal the dogs by posing as a couple in want of a pet, and then cage the howling dogs in kennels in their yard. The narrator is proud of her imperviousness to their suffering. "I bet Leo'd never find anyone who could listen to dogs cry the way I can," she tells us. "They call out and I can turn over and not even hear them." Her disturbing, almost willful apathy is slowly and brilliantly contrasted with her repressed guilt over her younger sister's sexual abuse as a child, which the narrator didn't try to stop.
Burdened by heavy consciences--or a disturbing absence of conscience--the women of This Is Not Your City are all terribly isolated, either geographically or personally. But in Horrocks's masterful prose, there is redemption and hope. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice