The Loved Ones: Essays to Bury the Dead

In this unrelentingly bleak collection, essayist Davis (Disaster) meditates on the deaths of four of her family members. “People keep getting scooped out of our family.... It should add up to something. Shouldn’t it?” she muses, reflecting on her brother’s death in a car accident, the grisly murder of a cousin, her father’s slow decline from multiple sclerosis, and the battlefield death of her great-uncle during WWII. “Kill Me Good” recounts the devastation her family felt after her cousin Tanner’s homicide at the hands of a coworker and the complicated emotions that accompanied the trial and the media hoopla around it, but the piece’s flashbacks to a Kentucky lynching attended by the author’s father in 1936 are more suggestive than revealing. In “Mercy,” which considers her father’s last months, Davis movingly captures the pain of watching a loved one’s protracted death. Unfortunately, other entries succumb to opaque pronouncements, as when she describes visiting the hillside in southern Italy where her grandfather died: “We are bold against the edges tightly.” The grim ruminations are ill-served by the perplexing prose, yet there are still some affecting moments, as when the author relates what went through her mind after her brother’s body was discovered: “We were supposed to be in this together.” Readers will find this a mixed bag. (June)