SAVE ME, STRANGER

A dozen bracing stories with far-flung settings are united around themes of escape and rescue.

Krouse’s second story collection is thick with restlessness, both across the book and within each story. “The Pole of Cold” is narrated by a young woman who’s mayor of a dismally frigid Siberian town and tempted to escape to New York with a visitor. In “North of Dodge,” a woman finds refuge from her white-supremacist uncle and guardian in a majority-Black neighborhood in Omaha. A young woman becomes alert to her father’s infidelities in “When in Bangkok,” and another heads to an Idaho hotel in a desperate escape from her abusive marriage in “Fear Me as You Fear God.” None of these pieces simplistically slot into women-in-trouble tales, though—“Fear Me” incorporates elements of ghost stories and sensitively works in the narrator’s growing ambivalence and paranoia. And the narrators aren’t always women: “Eat My Moose” is told by a man recalling his work secretively performing assisted suicides in Alaska, and “The Standing Man” is narrated by a worker in a Tokyo ramen shop who feels an unusual kinship with an American working in the city. Though Krouse’s stories are emotionally sensitive and precise, they don’t foreground style much, coolly and crisply delivering details and imagery. Just as impressively, she can use this straightforward approach persuasively when her conceits are relatively contrived: In the title story, a mother and daughter hunt for a woman named by a dying teenage criminal, the instrument in “The Piano” is defaced in absurd fashion, and “I Feel Like I Could Stand With You…” turns on a potted exchange over racist goods in a consignment shop. Even those stories thrive, because Krouse is gifted at capturing her characters’ dueling frustrations, needs, and fears.

A smart set of globetrotting, emotionally gripping stories.