Save Me, Stranger

October 14, 2024
Krouse (Tell Me Everything) delivers an affecting if occasionally schematic collection in which characters find help out of various states of despair. In the title story, a teenage boy intervenes during an armed robbery in a convenience store after the thieves take a woman hostage, sacrificing himself so she can stay with her 10-year-old daughter. The robbers shoot him, and before he dies, he utters the name Olivia, prompting the woman and her daughter to search for Olivia and tell her about his heroism. “Eat My Moose” follows two terminally ill veterans, Bonnie and Colum, who illicitly assist others with similar health conditions in death by suicide. The satisfying work offers Bonnie and Colum reprieve from the pain of their cancers, up until the story’s poignant conclusion. As the collection’s title suggests, strangers often bring salvation, though the situations aren’t always mortal. In “The Piano,” a middle-aged woman is offered a chance to play again after giving up the instrument decades earlier, when her parents deemed it impractical. Krouse sets up the recurring motif a bit too neatly at times, but in the volume’s best entries she makes the thrill of new beginnings palpable (“the relentlessness of the current, a stranger’s hand, and that strong pull back to life”). This is worth a look. Agent: Mary Evans, Mary Evans, Inc.

Starred review from November 1, 2024
The 11 fierce and unforgettable stories in the newest collection from Krouse (Tell Me Everything, 2022) take place around the globe, from a tiny, frozen town in Siberia to a ramen bar in Tokyo to the sex shops of Bangkok. These no-holds-barred stories often feature young women in trouble, sometimes of their own making but more frequently not. In "Fear Me as You Fear God," a woman flees an abusive husband, only to end up working an unpaid position at a haunted hotel in the Colorado mountains. Krouse's characters have often reached turning points that put them close to death. In "Eat My Moose," an Air Force combat veteran with inoperable pancreatic cancer joins up with a fellow vet to fly around Alaska, providing (thoroughly illegal) euthanasia services to people who request them. The brief and wrenching "Wounds of the Heart and Great Vessels" observes a woman caring for a near stranger through the worst week of his life while coming to terms with a loss of her own. While danger lurks around the corner for all of Krouse's characters, sometimes compassion saves the day.

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Starred review from November 15, 2024
A dozen bracing stories with far-flung settings are united around themes of escape and rescue. Krouse's second story collection is thick with restlessness, both across the book and within each story. "The Pole of Cold" is narrated by a young woman who's mayor of a dismally frigid Siberian town and tempted to escape to New York with a visitor. In "North of Dodge," a woman finds refuge from her white-supremacist uncle and guardian in a majority-Black neighborhood in Omaha. A young woman becomes alert to her father's infidelities in "When in Bangkok," and another heads to an Idaho hotel in a desperate escape from her abusive marriage in "Fear Me as You Fear God." None of these pieces simplistically slot into women-in-trouble tales, though--"Fear Me" incorporates elements of ghost stories and sensitively works in the narrator's growing ambivalence and paranoia. And the narrators aren't always women: "Eat My Moose" is told by a man recalling his work secretively performing assisted suicides in Alaska, and "The Standing Man" is narrated by a worker in a Tokyo ramen shop who feels an unusual kinship with an American working in the city. Though Krouse's stories are emotionally sensitive and precise, they don't foreground style much, coolly and crisply delivering details and imagery. Just as impressively, she can use this straightforward approach persuasively when her conceits are relatively contrived: In the title story, a mother and daughter hunt for a woman named by a dying teenage criminal, the instrument in "The Piano" is defaced in absurd fashion, and "I Feel Like I Could Stand With You..." turns on a potted exchange over racist goods in a consignment shop. Even those stories thrive, because Krouse is gifted at capturing her characters' dueling frustrations, needs, and fears. A smart set of globetrotting, emotionally gripping stories.

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December 20, 2024

Krouse, who won the Edgar Award for her memoir Tell Me Everything, turns to short stories with this collection, featuring a haunted bed-and-breakfast in the Rockies and an ice-cream truck driven by a teenage runaway. Prepub Alert.

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