In “The Alvord,” the first of eighteen stories in Hillary Behrman’s debut collection, Lake Effect, Viv, a middle-aged waitress at The Fields Station, a “café-gas-garage-motel” in rural southeast Oregon, races off at the end of each shift to her Chevy Nova, down the dusty road, and across “a bone-dry wash filled with bunchgrass and knotweed,” before leaving the road altogether and continuing cross-country to the vast cracked-mud playa that was once the bed of an ancient lake. She’s running from the voices in her head, and this place, after the commotion of the diner has died down, is by some mystery of nature her only respite. If she moves fast enough, she can be on the road before the chorus starts in earnest and long gone before she starts talking back. “She knows better than to talk back.”
Viv is getting by; she “has tapered so far off her meds that she might as well not be taking them” when she finds a lump in her breast. What follows threatens everything, and we feel it, just as if it is our own hard-fought existence on the line, as if it is us being pulled down again after clawing our way out for so long, inch by painful inch. Like so many of the characters in Behrman’s stories, the universe extends Viv an unlikely hand. Dale, her boss at the diner, that “goddam saint in saggy ass Wranglers” quietly convinces her that her life is worth saving, and Dayleen, the janitor at the shelter in the city where she must recuperate, post-surgery, post-chemo, tenderly prompts her, again and again, to break free of her paralysis and begin again.
I read this story—this one story—and immediately preordered five copies of Lake Effect for my book group. I’ve never done that before, I promise you. I was predisposed to like the book. After all, it was selected by Lauren Groff, an inarguable master of the form, as the winner of the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction at Sarabande Books. But my reaction still caught me off guard. “A great short story,” Groff writes in the book’s introduction, “is a glorious creature, sleek and sinuous, bearing very sharp teeth. A collection of them is redoubtable. Finish the book right before bed, and all night you can hear the stories running across your mind on the hunt, howling in your dreams.” There are many lovely sleek creatures to be discovered, out there in the wide world of fiction, but that’s what it was about this story. It sank its teeth into me.
Much of what has been said about Lake Effect thus far focuses on the geography and landscapes where the stories take place. From the cover alone, featuring a woodland scene that could be ripped straight from a National Parks poster, one might think it a cheerful travelogue, full of tales about backwoods hikers communing with nature. Place—the Cleveland and Seattle environs, often—does play a prominent role, but these are stories about people, plain and simple. People and the everyday horrors they confront. People so real you know them. People so real you are them, for the space of a dozen pages.
And those teeth. Those sharp, sharp teeth. Except for a couple of flash-length pieces that function almost as punctuation, these are meaty stories, with heft. They don’t flinch, but plunge us into mental illness, addiction, pregnancy loss, characters failing each other and failing themselves. A trigger warning field day. Bravery is required, in other words, to lose yourself in stories like these. More of it to write them.
You might not imagine, in times like these, that people would want to read sad stories so threaded through with ache. But they do. I do. Because there is something so inexplicably fortifying about them. Behrman’s stories serve up hopeless situations, but the afterimage they leave is precisely the opposite. Her characters, like Viv, draw support from unlikely places. It is not always enough, but sometimes it is. And the honesty of that can tide you over a long while.
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Publication Date: May 12, 2026
Reviewed by Dawn Goulet
Dawn Goulet is a Chicago-area writer who drafts legal opinions by day and fiction in all the moments in between making soup, observing rabbits, going on adventures with her family, and sitting porch patrol with Jim the Dog. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in Hypertext Magazine, Apricity Press, and Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose, among others. She is at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.