Horse Girl Fever

Lonely men drift toward disaster in this spirited and drug-fueled collection from Maloney (Red-Headed Pilgrim) set in and around Portland, Ore. The spare opener, “Ghost,” evokes Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son; the lovesick 40-year-old narrator meets a saintly bartender, hitches a ride on the back of a stranger’s bike to a Halloween party, snorts coke, “watche[s] a thousand white butterflies migrate across a memory from my childhood,” then weeps for his life. The narrator of the title story recalls his glory days selling cocaine in high school (“I was the Pablo Escobar of Beaverton”), and his long-running fascination with classmate Gina. When Gina, at 17, calls the narrator looking for weed, he pushes coke on her and then holds her all night. Years later, in the present, he hears Gina almost died from a heroin overdose and remembers how he once “rooted for her in the dark like a child after a night of bad dreams.” In “End Times, Charleston Avenue,” set during the Covid-19 lockdown, a couple hosts a rowdy “backyard social distance hangout.” The next morning, during the hungover narrator’s remote work shift, he hopes there isn’t vomit in his beard. Maloney is at his best with the gut-punch endings, which convey the characters’ desire for transcendence from their dingy lives. Though often sobering, these stories are great fun. (Jan.)