In Hollows, Tommy Dean reveals the crawlspaces and attics of American families, the places we dread and the places we yearn for-moments we didn’t know we needed until they were already lost. These fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers, wives, and best friends crack and bend under the pressure of conventional love, running away and toward one another, longing for a space to call home, often giving in to the hollow securities of their lives. In these forty-five flash fictions, you’ll find the last two people on Earth, wondering if love or ramen will keep them alive; two brothers racing the Y2K clock as they consider their fear for the future; a son convincing his father to abandon a decrepit house that has come to represent the old man’s stubbornness. These stories thrum with the electricity of wonder, challenged by the open wounds of love and guilt-for parents, for loved ones, for broken selves surviving among their desires to strike out in a world that threatens to harden them into desperate creatures. Dean’s clear and urgent prose unites reader and character as they wind down dark and uncertain paths toward the fading light.
