Some Phantom/No Time Flat — Stephen Beachy

A pair of novellas, lyrical, haunting, and bleak, that offer an unsparing yet emotionally rich vision of contemporary America. In Some Phantom an unnamed woman arrives in a strange city, fleeing a violent relationship. She begins to explore the city and its inhabitants and takes a job teaching disturbed children, but finds her own mental stability becoming more and more precarious. A marriage of The Turn of the Screw and Carnival of Souls, Some Phantom poses questions about the line between memory and madness, between fantasy and abuse.

These questions are further elaborated in No Time Flat, which follows Wade, a boy living a somewhat isolated existence with his elderly parents on the American plains, as he makes his way through a childhood marked by playground shootings and mysterious strangers. Wade then becomes a wanderer himself, inhabiting a sparse landscape of fleeting connections, lost children, and unformulated crimes.