The Nothing
by Lauren Davis
Fiction | 156 pages | ISBN: 978-1-946303-05-9
YesYes Books, May 2025
Review by Ashley Cowger
Adult children of alcoholics, trauma survivors, a town of people sick from jellyfish-like blobs that fall inexplicably from the sky—these are the characters that populate Lauren Davis’s dark and surrealistic short story collection, The Nothing. Although the stories are grounded in reality—the citizens of Oakville, WA, for example, did take ill after a series of gelatinous rainstorms in 1994—the collection has a magical quality. As the collection’s title suggests, the central thread connecting these stories is the concept of “the nothing.” The word nothing and its variants appear repeatedly in these stories, as do real or imagined ghosts, the physical manifestation of absence, nothingness. In The Nothing, the abstract concept of nothingness is a concrete presence.
Perhaps the best example of this nothingness made literal is the story “No Eyes for Them,” in which all male figures become invisible to the narrator. Boxes move; delivery vans drive with no one at the wheel; women contort their bodies in sexual poses with no partner. The men are there, but not there, living ghosts. Their nothingness is tangible. In “My Cat Called Chester,” Chester the cat has bite marks that only the narrator can see. In “What the Body Says,” this nothing takes the form of an undiagnosed pain in the narrator’s right ovary. Meanwhile, as her father lays dying, he insists “he feels no pain. That he feels nothing.”
The concept of nothingness is not the only abstraction made literal in these stories. Abuse, neglect, loss become physical beings within these pages. In “The One Who Tucks You in at Night,” the literal monster living in the walls of Carol’s childhood home mirrors the monster that was her alcoholic mother and her father, who did nothing to protect her. In “The Bright,” memories of a fire that killed Skye’s family becomes a ghost named Ash. In “The Sleeping Cure,” a wife’s insomnia is cured when her husband replaces her heart with a bear’s, triggering hibernation.
It is no surprise that Lauren Davis writes poetry in addition to fiction. The stories in The Nothing exist at the crossroads between poetry and prose, emphasizing sensory experience to turn the abstract concrete. In “The Bright,” for example, Andy’s bakery “smells like mothers, like winter after a rain.” The smell of the bread is a welcome change from the smell of melting plastic Skye is haunted by since her family’s death by fire. In “The Sleeping Cure,” Luke’s hibernating wife “stinks of yellow grass, mud” and her physical features are transformed, bearlike, when she awakens from her long sleep.
Likewise, the titles of the stories often add depth and meaning. For example, the title of “Gekker” refers to the vocalizations a fox makes when she encounters a rival. The story follows Amaris, a human child born with yellow eyes and a fox’s tail, who finds a rival in the local pastor’s son, who believes Amaris is the devil. The title of “The One Who Tucks You in at Night” literally refers to the story’s protagonist, Carol, who covers her friend Monia with a blanket one night, but it also calls to mind Carol’s neglectful parents. “My Medusa” compares the narrator’s left hand, which has turned into a jellyfish, to the mythical gorgon.
The Nothing is a short story collection that lends itself to multiple reads. These stories are short but meaty, layered. They are like lucid dreams that blur the lines between what is real and what is imagined, what is seen and what is left outside the sharp focus of the camera’s lens. At long last we have an author who creates the perfect argument against everyone’s need for an objective correlative. Anyone and any story can have a soul even if nothing defines it in the T. S. Eliot way.
Ashley Cowger (she/they) is the author of two short story collections: On the Plus Side (Galileo Press) and Peter Never Came (Autumn House Press). Their fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in several literary journals. They work as an Associate Teaching Professor at Penn State Harrisburg, where they teach courses in creative writing, composition, and literature. They are a Capricorn.