House Gone Quiet: Stories

Norris’s skillful debut collection evokes an atmosphere of foreboding across a wide variety of situations. In “The Sound of Women Waiting,” set in an unnamed war-torn country and made eerie by its nondescript location, narrator Satya struggles to survive in enemy territory, where she and other imprisoned women are forced into marriages with local men, while other captives descend into thievery and murder. The frothy “Air Shifts” revolves around a call-in show called The Talk with Tabitha, where DJs Jack and Bubba toss out cavalier advice and one-liners. When one caller suspects her husband is having an affair with the mother of their son’s T-ball teammate, Bubba responds, “Catfight at the T-ball field!” After a longtime caller asks for sex advice, host Tabitha blithely declares, “You’re my family. We’re all in this together,” without addressing the problem. The heroine of the standout story “Go Way Back” drives across several states with her boyfriend Carter and into the increasingly scary and unfamiliar domain of his parents. Though the reader will usually sense where Norris is headed, the details are spot on. This bears the mark of an assured writer. (Oct.)