The Younger

An Indies Introduce pick

The stories in Daniel J. O'Malley's The Younger are transmissions from another place. A haunting debut from an accomplished new voice.

A boy shows up on a couple's porch one day and gently works his way into their life. Two friends find a knife in a field and find themselves caught up in a frightening game. On a family vacation, a woman serves her granddaughters berries that might or might not be poisonous. A widower haunted by an iguana relives the horrors of his past. A mother wonders what to do when her son brings home a bone he found in the woods, then more bones, and more...

By turns tender and unsettling, The Younger gives portraits of characters in isolation, wandering the woods and highways looking for people they might call family, places they might call home. In prose elemental and precise, O'Malley unravels mysteries that lurk just out of view, hoping to make sense of loneliness and grief, the mundane and the impossible. O'Malley navigates the spaces in between and shows us a world just uncanny enough to be our own.