The Nothing, Lauren Davis's debut fiction collection, exists on the whisper between reality and illusion. Think Shirley Jackson's characters stuck in the damp Pacific Northwest or an Olympic Peninsula funhouse mirror held up to Karen Russell's Florida. The worlds Davis creates acknowledge the terror and seek the gifts of solitude, grief, and the unrelenting thirst for certainty within us all. In The Nothing, Lauren Davis channels the eerie surrealism and biting social critique of Aimee Bender and Ramona Ausubel, though these folktales are all her own. Each story fractures expectation and then gathers up what's left, creating a bricolage of the uncanny. "Shadows cannot be caught," Davis writes, but here she has done just that-harnessed the lingering traces of The Real and reanimated them. Morphed by nostalgia, grief, and the strangeness of desire in all its forms, Davis's stories are tiny portals through the mundane into something fresher and truer and thus more beautiful. -Lindsey Drager, author of The Avian Hourglass