Davis resists easy categorization, blending elements of the fantastic with grounded, emotional storytelling. Instead of fitting neatly into any one genre, the nineteen stories within The Nothing thrive in its in-between spaces, allowing each tale to unfold in unexpected and deeply affecting ways.
—Compulsive Reader
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
Lauren Davis has written such unnerving stories and characters that one wants to watch them unfold even after their final turn, evoking Bergman or Lynch.
—Luke Goebel, author of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours
The stories in The Nothing harbor ghosts, mountain views, movie theatres, and haunting pastorals to create a world that is both modern and eternal as fable. Davis’s landscapes feel as fully inhabited as the magnificent, occasionally grotesque dreamscapes the narrators lead us into, the surreal grounded in the startlingly real. Rich with vivid details and the subtle intimacies of life, this book traverses slowly and bravely into the dark, flickering with flame and sifting through the ashes of grief to tell “graciously human” stories.
—Erin Slaughter, author of A Manual for How to Love Us
There are ghosts in these stories. Sometimes literal, other times only in metaphor or feeling, but ever present in every story in Lauren Davis’s The Nothing is something just off page, under the surface, aching and yearning and pulling and haunting every sharp, minimal, perfect sentence, not unlike the way these stories themselves will get their hooks in you and keep haunting long after you’ve put it down.
—Aaron Burch, author of Year of the Buffalo
Reviews:
The Nothing by Lauren Davis | Free State Review
A Review of The Nothing – Compulsive Reader
Interviews:
Hayden’s Ferry Review – Kristen Therese Chua Interviews Lauren Davis
An Interview With Lauren Davis | What We Reading
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Lauren Davis 