A film studies major gets a meat-processing job supervising the systematic dismemberment and disembowelment of chickens. A troubled loner finds the man of her dreams in a shoebox of horse figurines; a depressed mother is riddled with anxiety about her toddler daughter's eerily coded accounts of a "ghost." The short stories in Melissa Reddish's newest collection, My Father Is An Angry Storm Cloud, reconfigure the boundaries between victim and aggressor--and between complicity and innocence--in exhilarating prose that is at once sensibly deadpan and mysteriously hallucinatory....

A girl bonds with a piece of flame leftover from the inferno that consumed her brother, father, and lover. Through this relationship, the girl explores her complicated family history and her place in a world where trees are cruel and deceptive, ghosts rise from abandoned cabins, and the quiet hum of the forest permeates even the most dehumanizing office buildings. Meanwhile, the flame discovers new fuel: human need, hot and vile. Both the girl and the flame journey into their own suffering to find answers on the other side. Told in a series of innovative flash vignettes, Melissa Reddish's...