Stop All Other Activity and Read this Book

I don’t know how Wells Tower learned to write the way he does, but it’s fortunate for the rest of us that he did. His debut collection of stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, demands that once you begin reading, you do not put it down. (I might ask: Why would you put it down?) The collection begins and ends on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In the first story, "The Brown Coast", Bob Munroe incorrectly builds a flight of stairs in a new house. A man falls down the stairs, files a lawsuit, and Bob is fired. Then his wife finds out he’s been cheating on her. Thus the theme of self-imposed exile is set in motion: Bob moves to his uncle Randall’s fixer-upper on the tip of a small island. A neglected aquarium begins to fill with sea life that Bob fishes out of a tide pool. His wife may or may not divorce him.

In "Retreat", the narrator exiles himself to an unfinished mountaintop cabin in Maine, spending much of his time drinking with an old local named George. This is a story about brothers: Matthew, the narrator, invites his little brother, Stephen, across the country to see the mountain and the cabin, part of a continuous state of sibling rivalry.

A man’s father is forgetting his own family members and the short-term details of his life in another story. In "Leopard", you are an eleven-year-old boy who hates his stepfather with a passion. And of course the title story must be experienced for itself.

Wells Tower has a suprising eye for fresh images. The sun, in "The Brown Coast", looks "orange and slick, like a canned peach." The eighty-three-year-old narrator of "Door in Your Eye" describes what he used to write in his diary: "...when I looked back on what I wrote, I noticed I’d become like a cheap newspaperman about my life, only telling unpleasant things–-when I fought with my wife, or how much money I had given my daughter, or a time I was eating at a restaurant and a woman fell off her chair from a seizure." Tower describes a flock of geese calling to each other "in voices like nails being pulled from old boards."

I cannot do this book justice with these few meager examples. How much simpler it would be if you just read it yourself. Please do. Buy a copy new, and support this man’s writing. I hope to see another Wells Tower collection or a novel forthcoming someday soon.