Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

By the back half, the darkness starts to feel like a fixed setting rather than an earned effect: one professional reviewer describes going “candy-sick of cleverness” around page 230, arguing that unlike O'Connor or Saunders, Tower never gestures toward a redemptive path. Readers flag stories that build a small flare of momentum and then stop right as “by the time it hits an interesting stride, the story ends.” A cluster of 2 and 3-star reviews call the collection well-crafted but derivative, dismissing it as “post-Raymond-Carver American fiction” that doesn't push past its influences. The parade of first-person, middle-aged male narrators drinking through divorce blurs story to story, and one reader sums up the set flatly as “a collection of utterly depressing stories about self-indulgent losers.” Aside from the title story, most entries decline to resolve at all.