In his haunting first short story collection, Miles Harvey (The King of Confidence) inventively links 12 tales of life's transient nature through the unexpected reappearances of mementos across multiple stories. The Registry of Forgotten Objects, the title of both the collection and its final story, is a dystopian facility that embodies impermanence. It houses items from many eras, including "the Great Forgetting, that cataclysmic period when certain machines, now extinct, are said to have subsumed all human knowledge."
Although this story is unsettling, others include pathos and humor, and the recurring objects create a treasure-hunt ambiance. In "The Drought," a TV weatherman in a small city has an affair with a barber's wife. Environmental devastation underscores this story, but the ancient barber pole here reappears in ensuing stories. In "Four Faces," a bereaved father discovers it on the Florida beach where his son disappeared six years earlier, and his daughter recalls it resentfully. Later, it becomes a mysterious item at a Michigan estate sale.
Fittingly, "The Complete Miracles of St. Anthony: Definitive Edition with Previously Unpublished Material" marks an appearance by the patron saint of lost things. An archeologist says her impulse is for "crossing the divide of time to search for something lost, something missing, something that will make sense of everything else." Colorful ephemera recurs--a wedding-cake topper, counterfeit coins--and poignant symbols repeat. A German scholar who is eventually murdered in the Holocaust obsesses over a haunting refrain attributed to Sappho: "Remember us, remember us, remember us." Many years later, a mother hums to her colicky baby. She can't name the melody, but readers will know the song. --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.