Strange Weather: Four Short Novels

Hill’s follow up to 2016’s The Fireman is a quartet of suspenseful novellas, narrated in this production by four familiar, well-chosen actors. Actor Wil Wheaton portrays, in “Snapshot,” a nerdy yet heroic Silicon Valley teen who tries to save an elderly neighbor from a sinister bully whose Polaroid Instant Camera erases memories. “Aloft” casts actor Dennis Boutsikaris as a reluctant novice skydiver who, trying to impress a young woman, falls into a cloud so solid it floats him away, then begins breaking apart. In “Rain,” actor Kate Mulgrew portrays an assortment of Coloradans trying to cope with storms that send crystal shards to Earth; the story’s protagonist is a woman trying to stay alive while traveling from Boulder to Denver to care for her late girlfriend’s family. In “Loaded,” Stephen Lang turns in two excellent performances: a roaring portrayal of an embittered small-town Florida mall cop as he transforms into a homicidal maniac, and a nuanced, subdued portrayal of the cop’s bête noire, a soft-spoken, maternal newswoman. The stories are intriguing on their own, but the readers raise them to a higher level of entertainment. A Morrow hardcover. (Nov.)