Were We Awake was released November 20, 2019 by Fomite Press. I’d enjoyed L. M. Brown’s first collection of short stories (Treading the Uneven Ground) so much I was compelled to read her second collection of stories. The cover of Were We Awake brings to mind the Norwegian Expressionist artist Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream, with the starkness of the setting and the taut emotions of the lone figure. Those themes run through all of Brown’s stories.
Set in the late 20th century Ireland and Boston, Were We Awake is a collection of inter-related short stories. Melancholy weaves like a ribbon through these stories, as does (it seems strange to say this of a book filled with words) silence. The writing is stark, poetic, with far more beneath the surface than the words indicate.
In “Hidden,” when Hazel discovers her father and her aunt are having an affair, it’s only the start of finding other hidden secrets. The fourteen–year-old daughter of an alcoholic narrates “What It Means to Be Empty-Handed.” She pretends to be the lost baby in an article she read, and her carefully-built world starts to disintegrate when she lies to the wrong person.
Like characters in Brown’s prior work,
Treading the Uneven Road, these people are blunt, taciturn to a fault, even with loved ones—so silent that what dialogue there is resonates. There’s a paucity of visible emotion, but underlying loneliness, rage, love, grief, depression. The desire to escape conflicts with the desire to remain. In each story, the characters’ isolated lives consist of empty moments strung together like beads, yet the world they inhabit is not as it seems. These are small folks, with small, ordinary lives, befuddled by life’s circumstances. Read as a whole, these stories reveal much of human strengths and frailties. While many of the stories are sad, this is a strong collection which I’d wholeheartedly recommend.
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