Invisibilia

Tom Howard’s award-winning debut short story collection, Fierce Pretty Things, won accolades for blending “raw emotion with surreal forays into the supernatural and metaphysical.” With his second collection, Invisibilia, Howard takes the reader on a mesmerizing ride through a haunting, haunted landscape of children, drifters, soldiers, lovers, and ghosts, and the unseen forces that shape their lives. Two sisters and their parents slowly disappear, each in their own way, after a universe-shaking decision; a young solder returns broken from Vietnam to his hometown, where he must follow a set of mystifying instructions as part of a peculiar homecoming ritual; the father of an emotionally estranged teen tries to reconnect with his son through the wonder of nature and the spectacle of a bloody, nightmarish parade; a sweet but disfigured actor, renowned for the monsters he once played, seeks one final, redemptive role at the end of his career; and otherworldly scavengers haunt a city’s rooftops, feeding on the memories and the stories of the dead. In these deftly crafted narratives, Tom Howard opens a window into a world that’s at times wildly strange, funny, sad, and absurd, but always achingly, helplessly human.