Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids by Leyna Krow: Review by Jake Casella Brookins

Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids, Leyna Krow (Penguin 9780593299654, $19.00, 304pp, tp) January 2025. Cover design by Nerylsa Dijol.

Leyna Krow’s Sinkhole, and Other Inexpli­cable Voids is a dazzling, vivid collection. Throughout its 16 stories, Krow expertly threads together a handful of elements: magical or absurd developments, incisive snapshots of familial loves and fears, and haunting reflections on climate change disasters. Shared thematic con­cerns and a handful of connected stories give the collection a remarkable feeling of cohesion, and of building – each story here is worth your time, and the whole is more than the sum of its parts in a way I rarely see with collections.

The speculative elements that most immediately jump out here are the outlandish magical events that shape around half the selections. In “The Twin”, for example, a story whose characters re­cur throughout the collection, first-time parents Jenna and Troy, find that their newborn son has inexplicably gained a brother while they weren’t looking. In the titular “Sinkhole”, a family discov­ers that any broken thing thrown into the hole in their yard reappears, magically repaired, soon after, and begins to wonder what would happen to a human if they jumped in. Krow positions these instances of irrealism within larger worlds, and within characters, that feel very real – sometimes humorous, often poignant, the reactions to the absurd underscore the stories’ more mundane matters without undermining them.

Family and domestic life are major interests of the collection, and fear and grief about climate change inform many of the more potent stories – but there’s also a great tonal variety here, shifting from serious to comic, absurd to heartfelt, and a great tempo in the stories’ lengths and pacing. These stories play off each other like comple­mentary flavors – the melancholy of childhood reminiscence in “The Unmatched Joy of Killing Something Beautiful” and “Winter Animals” only sharpen the bitter absurdity of “Moser”, in which a premature baby has grown to a full-size man in just a few months. For all that the collec­tion is brimming with deep fears for family and the future, it also features “The Octopus Finds Love at Home” (a cephalopod meet-cute with a snappy modern voice), “Tara’s Ultrabooth™ Supplements for Good Health and Good Times” (a joyously frantic suburban comedy with a second-person plural narrator that recalls Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife), and the dis­tinctly T.C. Boyle-esque “Chet’s Landing Resort and Luxury Cabins”, a darkly, drily comic tale in which a couple try to spice up their love life with crime and murder, emphasis on “try.” The most science-fictional story in the book, “A Plan to Save Us All”, is also the most overtly funny, with a series of apocalypse-preventing time travelers arriving in a small town and stumbling about heroically.

The centerpiece of the collection, at least on my reading, is “Outburst”. The longest story here, it follows a young glaciology postdoc, Andi Carling, as she attempts to gather data on Mount Rainier. Fearing that a weakening glacier might trigger a lahar – a violent flood of mud and debris, usually caused by volcanic activity – Andi finds herself scrabbling against a wall of institutional indiffer­ence and people’s aversion to taking novel threats seriously. It’s an extremely well-crafted story, mak­ing communication difficulties into the central beats, rich with quick and subtle evocations of characters and settings, and had me thinking of Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality and work by Kim Stanley Robinson. Krow captures in miniature the dread of climate disaster, but also the love of the outdoors and the cultures that accrue around it; reading “Outburst”, I was struck by the strangeness of wishing for disaster if only to be proven right.

Although it doesn’t contain any speculative elements beyond the near-future climate nar­rative, “Outburst” does connect to the handful of stories about the family we first meet in “The Twin”, which hints at how the weirder devices of the collection orbit the same ideas as its more realistic stories. Nicholas, the twin who appeared out of nowhere, does seem to develop some kind of nebulous supernatural power later in life – the ability to conjure up living things, though not enough to make any large-scale difference (bring­ing to mind B. Pladek’s quietly excellent Dry Land) – but his stories, and those of his siblings and parents, are grounded in very ordinary fears and hopes, as well as in the Pacific Northwest set­ting that very much feels like a character in many of the collection’s entries. It’s always good to get a collection full of so many striking images – it’s rare to get one so effective at integrating so many very different stories into something cohesive, that builds tension and connects ideas in startling ways. Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids is highly recommended.

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This review and more like it in the February 2025 issue of Locus.

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