In The Dark

When Darkness Loves Us by Elizabeth Engstrom contains two weird novellas; in both stories, small-town life becomes even smaller-- the stories are macabre, full of plot holes, possibly allegorical, and oddly compelling-- and they will really stretch your empathy muscles and let you see from two very unique and very strange female perspectives-- a tunnel dwelling troglodyte of a mom and a lonely, dimwitted, traumatized old woman without a nose . . . and according to George R.R. Martin, this is the point of fiction: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . the man who never reads lives only one.”