Just over halfway through McAndrew\u2019s collection comes a story called \u201cCrime and Punishment,\u201d a title that would accurately describe most of these tales, which often reckon with incarceration, guilt, and the aftereffects of violent acts. Sometimes that reaches baroque heights, as in \u201cThe Storyteller,\u201d about a couple named Wayne and Nancy who buy \u201cthe house that had been the site of the famous Hobson murders.\u201d The violent acts that took place there don\u2019t return to the surface until the pair has divorced, with the house\u2019s potential for supernatural visitations something Wayne taps into in conversations with his children. The young narrator of the title story sees an arm waving from a nearby prison and starts to wonder what its owner\u2019s story might be: \u201cat bedtime, my imagination unraveled like a scroll of every crime I\u2019d ever heard of.\u201d McAndrew has sympathy for many of his characters; Maria, protagonist of \u201cThe Familiar Dark,\u201d has a penchant for casual burglary but winds up helping an older woman, Ania, who\u2019s in the midst of a complicated grieving process. Late in the collection, McAndrew uses questions of crime and guilt to raise the stakes, placing his characters in places where they must try to understand the people in their lives\u2014whether it\u2019s a relative who committed a terrible act in \u201cLetters From Toby\u201d or a man with a penchant for unusual pets living in a halfway house in \u201cHow I Came To See the World.\u201d McAndrew doesn\u2019t shrink from asking big moral questions, and his fiction abounds with lived-in touches and a sense of scale.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Just over halfway through McAndrew\u2019s collection comes a story called \u201cCrime and Punishment,\u201d a title that would accurately describe most of these tales, which often reckon with incarceration, guilt, and the aftereffects of violent acts. Sometimes that reaches baroque heights, as in \u201cThe Storyteller,\u201d about a couple named Wayne and Nancy who buy \u201cthe house […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3990,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3989"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}