If the Sky Falls

Starred review from August 15, 2005
Montemarano plays with the purpose and effect of storytelling in his dark, powerful debut collection (after A Fine Place
) even as he crafts believably troubled psyches. The unreliable narrators of these 11 first-person stories are haunted by memories of violence and cruelty they can neither forget nor make sense of; only occasionally do they find redemption and tenderness in unexpected ways. In "To Fall Apart,'' a man revisits his sister's childhood disappearance, "the story I have revised so many times that it is now more memory than imagination,'' fantasizing a different, happier ending for her. Stories serve this man as anodynes, albeit temporary ones, allowing him some form of dignity and hope. In "The Usual Human Disabilities,'' a caretaker for two imperious cerebral palsy sufferers cracks under the pressure of his thankless work and abuses his charges in a warped effort to treat them extra-special. "The November 15" is a deeply disturbing account of a man broken by arbitrary torture. The stylistically playful if not so readable piece, "The Worst Degree of Unforgivable,'' details obsessive-compulsive behavior and barely suppressed rage via an 11-page-long single sentence. Montemarano handles brutality and abjection with ambiguity and subtlety while taking assured metafictional leaps. Agent, Jill Grinberg
.

November 15, 2005
Having abandoned fiction in the 1990s, the publisher has chosen to reverse course, starting with this first collection from Montemarano. Atmospheric, episodic, and occasionally tinged with forboding, the stories here don't always follow a full arc but have slice-of-life intensity. Essential wherever short stories are popular.

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.