Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons

Starred review from November 30, 2020
With this excellent collection of 15 jagged, fragmented pieces, dark fantasist Rosson (The Mercy of the Tide) subverts expectations and challenges his characters and his readers alike to second-guess their preconceptions. Evil is just as likely to spring from daily life as to lunge out of the supernatural in these disquieting tales. “Gifts,” a lacerating story of urban insurrection, feels firmly rooted in reality, except that some combatants are described in passing as “magicians.” The premises often look like very dark Monty Python sketches. What happens, for example, in “Baby Jill,” when the Tooth Fairy stops merely collecting teeth and begins worrying about the welfare of the children she visits? And, in “Yes, We Are Duly Concerned with Calamitous Events,” how quickly will social norms devolve among a group of office workers who become trapped in their building for weeks? No one is safe, not even the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who appear in “The Lesser Horsemen” as God decides to modernize. These powerful stories will leave readers unsettled in the best ways.

January 8, 2021
Rosson's stories are often cynical tales, with hope dotting their cores: stories centered on people who are stuck, who are longing for something in their pasts, who are floundering within addiction, struggling through recovery, or who have been in some way left behind. Human protagonists grasp for support, while mythic figures deal with mundane existence, as when the three horsemen of the apocalypse who aren't Death are told to step away from their work for a while. Many of Rosson's stories deal with the trauma and pain of addiction, from the searing "Dunsmuir," an emotional story of a man struck by tragedy as he goes sober, to "Brad Benshe and the Hand of God," about a man leaving petty, cutting notes for the brother of his wife, who left him for a cult. In another tale, the staff of an office finds themselves trapped in their building, unsure whether the world has ended. Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons is for readers who will enjoy Rosson's dark humor and his stories' tough emotional cores.

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