If Orringer has a problem, it’s one endemic to the modern short story: that these are for the most part still lives they don’t go anywhere. This dark-tinged flavor is echoed in “Stations of the Cross,” the volume’s climactic story, which has deeper things on its mind-the travails of a Jewish girl trying to figure out where she stands in an almost entirely Catholic small Louisiana town-before going off the rails with a children’s reenactment of the Crucifixion that starts to mirror a lynching. In the opening piece, “Pilgrims,” a simple Thanksgiving Day visit by a family to the house of some friends takes a macabre turn when the game being played by the children in the backyard goes too far.
As a career calling card, one could definitely do worse than this debut collection of nine stories.
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