The Peripatetic Coffin, Ethan Rutherford's debut collection of short stories, is a keeper. His work creeps up on you when you're not looking, like the title story. The coffin in question is the Civil War-era submarine H. L. Hunley: 40 metallic feet long, with a four-foot beam and a cabin height of four feet, it is the Confederacy's secret savior. With a bomb attached to the bow, it will, with underwater stealth, destroy the Union ships blockading Charleston harbor. Narrated by Ward Lumpkin, who mans the second crank station, the tale is one of honor, courage and blind faith in a "contraption that has killed thirteen men, including its inventor, on test runs alone." Their night attack on the USS Housatonic succeeds, but the sub never makes it back to port. In the dark, as the water rises, Ward wonders if they were "but a spectacle of self-defeat."
There are two other beautifully rendered nautical tales. "The Santa Anna" is a superbly atmospheric piece about a Russian schooner trapped in the Arctic ice; "dirwhals!" is a sharp piece of environmental science fiction about the shipper-tank Halcyon hunting sand-diving beasts on the "rolling hills and oppressive heat" of the Desert Gulf of Mexico, a million miles from earth.
In "A Mugging," a middle-aged couple is mugged at night. Charles is punched in the face; the first time ever. Quietly, painfully, Rutherford reveals the "unsettling" effects of the incident, culminating in a snowy night when Charles sees Claire in the window: "He wishes she were anyone, at this point, but his wife." He pulls his hood low over his face and throws a snowball at the window, "pleased with the sound."
"Summer Boys," about two inseparable fifth-graders, opens all nostalgic: the joys of youth, skateboarding, adventures. Then, as with "A Mugging," the story takes a turn down a dark corridor in one boy's house. And even though they're "just boys," one of them "senses the end of something approaching." He tells us he will "be in this basement the rest of my life."
Add a whimsical, absurdist tale about a summer camp where campers die trying to retrieve a stolen mascot moose head, a powerful portrait about a son gone wrong and its devastating effect on the family and, to round things out, ruminations on lost love and a sick alpaca, and you've got a revelatory feast of storytelling. --Tom Lavoie
Shelf Talker: Eight masterful tales inject power, subtlety and emotion into an unforgettable cast of beleaguered, doomed characters.