Lesser Apocalypses

Like "snow in the tropics," this collection is a revelation. Clustered as shell-shocked survivors, Bayard Godsave's Lesser Apocalypses occupy the edge of ruin. Though bleak, the stories contained here are enlivened, emboldened, by disaster. A man emotionally undone by his time inside a missile silo, by the turn of his key; a gas mask that reflects a marriage's murkiness; a domestic bomber whose conscience ignites every fuse; a post-nuclear war refugee facing concurrent adolescence, motherhood, and middle age; and two former cosmonauts disengaged from everything but each other are all vivid against a tenebrous backdrop. Underpinned by a series of prophetic vignettes, the book's blast zones are aglow-illuminating, through stark humanity, the blazing end of devastation.