A quietly astonishing collection ... The strongest stories... are shot through with almost subliminal strangeness and build toward endings of uncanny attenuation, endings worthy of Raymond Carver in his later, elegiac mode.
The 15 just shy-of minimalist tales collected in San Antonio writer Andrew Porter’s latest book, The Disappeared, suggest that the marriage of existential crisis and domestic ennui, once the exclusive territory of arthouse auteurs like Ingmar Bergman or Louis Malle, can work convincingly as literary fiction set in a Riverwalk beer joint or a West Lake Hills patio party ... under Porter’s literary prowess, a comfortable get-together turns into a Dostoyevskian debate about murder and home invasion, and an infinity pool becomes a guilty grotto where a man and woman, ostensibly in mourning, negotiate the sorrows of an unrealized affair.
While every story in the collection is alike in theme and tone, each one is haunting, memorable, and stands alone in its own right ... Despite their similarity in form, tone, and content, the stories in The Disappeared are not formulaic.
