Randall and Marcy's tumultuous marriage is punctuated by silence and indifference. Much in the manner of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, McNeal seamlessly weaves their story with intense, sometimes graphic tales of the other townspeople. These interlocking stories chronicle the unknowingly unhappy, and the vulgar that underpins what for all appearances is simple, bucolic. McNeal's incredibly cinematic descriptions tellingly dramatize the slow, dull aches of hearts stuck in muddy, rutted roads of emotion. McNeal writes with a quiet intensity, and his scenes of domestic heartbreak and terror happen in the middle of paragraphs.
Affairs happen, friendships fail, marriages fray, and people die in strange, violent ways.
This is a day in the life. All this simply occurs. The depths of despair Philip Shumway is only 13 years old when his older brother disappears. Stepping out to explore Baker's Bottoms Pond near his rural Massachusetts home, the child prodigy vanishes without a trace. Frederick Reiken's The Odd Sea chronicles the decade following the disappearance, examining how the event affects an already dysfunctional family.