SEE HOW SMALL

The grisly deaths of three girls radiate across a community, which becomes as fragmented as this novel’s impressionistic prose.

“The men with guns did things to us.” The second novel by Blackwood (We Agreed To Meet Just Here, 2009, etc.) opens with a harrowing collective invocation by a trio of teenage girls working in an Austin ice cream shop, two of them sisters, who in a robbery, were bound and gagged with their underwear, then killed when the shop was burned down. In brief chapters thick with fire and ghost imagery, Blackwood alternates among a handful of men and women affected by the tragedy: Kate, the mother of two of the girls; Jack, a firefighter who entered the carnage; Hollis, an Iraq vet and witness; Rosa, a reporter; and Michael, the getaway driver for the killers. A more conventional novel might apply a worlds-in-collision template to these characters, emphasizing their shared experience. But Blackwood’s style is much more slippery, and his characters’ struggles are more particular and isolated. Michael’s grip on reality slackens as his drug use increases and he struggles to keep custody of his daughter, while Hollis finds his PTSD triggers resurgent, and Kate cycles through relationships. The connective thread among them isn’t so much the tragedy as the dour, vaguely symbolic experiences they have, from the portentous utterances of Michael’s grandmother-in-law (“Are you from the planet of men?”) to interludes in the voices of the dead girls themselves. The novel is strikingly creepy, if a bit affected—the brevity of the chapters and gauzy prose have a lyrical effect but also make the story feel diffuse, with no one peculiar, uncanny moment given the chance to build up a head of steam.

Blackwood is an excellent stylist, though in the name of unconventionality, the reader lacks a few narrative toeholds.