Book Review: EMBER DAYS by Nick Ripatrazone
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Ember Days by Nick Ripatrazone |
| Alleyway Books, 2015 $16.00 |
COME BACK HERE. KNOW A GUY WHO CAN HELP YOU FIND THE BOMB.
Ember Days opens almost immediately with this all-caps note—a message from a brother to a brother, a last-ditch effort to reunite, to collect a debt, and to repent for a wrongdoing. This is the core of the collection, slightly rotten and a little sweet. The past in muddied recollections. Characters trying to overcome the tragedies and disappointments of their past, whether it be a deceased daughter, a taped-over VHS, or even a bomb that burned much too brightly.
With sentences that oftentimes blend prose and poetry, Nick Ripatrazone’s Ember Days is a gorgeous read. Eight stories that flow off the page, slithering in your ear and rattling around your skull. The language is beautiful, but can occasionally lose the reader with its generous use of metaphoric imagery. Though when the images land, Ember Days captures ether.
Indeed, the setting is never static—Ripatrazone flies between decades, from the sand-blasted New Mexico desert, to the suburban homes of blue-collar families riddled with dysfunction. No two stories in the collection feel the same; there’s constant momentum. And it helps that the various characters of Ember Days think of themselves in relation to the setting, the inexorable forces of nature that shape their lives—the desert, first and foremost. Ember Days spends a good chunk of its page count in the arid wasteland, and Ripatrazone writes life into an otherwise dead landscape.
The desert appeared so stale and white, as if God had created the vast expanse for one reason: to be blown up.
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Wind spun through the cracked windows and he moved his mattress to the kitchen. He kept a blanket over his face and wondered if he would ever wake up. He had dreams within dreams and saw the desert in black and white, and imagined peeling off his own skin and touching bone and feeling so real.
Ember Days is swift in its pacing, in that it offers glimpses—quick flashes of human depravity. Cruelty from one brother to another, blistering dialogue between spouses, the occasional hard-handed violence. There’s an especially terrible moment in one short story when the reader suddenly realizes a next-door neighbor isn’t merely a friendly role model to a young boy. The collection allows us to see the worst in its cast of characters, often through the machinations of the surreal landscape—the desert, rearing up with its grit and heat, catching people in its swell and dragging them down and under.
These terrible, human moments consistently surprised me—they come almost out of nowhere. Almost. Once you realize what’s happening and the shock wears off, the stories kind of just…click into place.