Quickly, While They Still Have Horses

Frustrations large and small beset the Northern Irish characters in Carlson’s dry-witted and appealing fifth collection (after The Raptures). In “A Certain Degree of Ownership,” an unnamed woman encounters a family with a baby on the rarely used public beach she’s come to consider her own. When the baby begins to crawl, unnoticed, into the sea, the narrator thinks, “I do not want the baby to crawl into the sea. But I do not think it is my job to stop the baby crawling into the sea.” “Fair Play” centers on a Londoner staying on his wife’s family’s land in Ulster during the Covid-19 pandemic. He takes his two sons to Bouncy Bob’s, the Belfast equivalent of Chuck E. Cheese, and panics when they disappear in a tube slide and the attendants show no concern (“This place is hungrier than other places,” he thinks. “It will never let go of its own”). Other entries probe the region’s folk magic practices, as in “Tinged,” where a friend of the narrator’s family casts a spell to heal their ailing cow. Some stories end before making the most of their provocative premises, but for the most part Carson holds the reader’s attention with her singular observations and turns of phrase. This is worth a look. (July)