by Charles Holdefer

(step)sisters by Curtis Smith

The phrase “there’s no place like home” doesn’t always evoke cozy nostalgia. Considered another way, it marks an absence, or perhaps an exile. Maybe Dorothy has nowhere to go, or she lives in an Oz of mean streets.

Such is the situation in Curtis Smith’s (step)sisters (Trompe l’Oeil Press, 223 pages). Set in Philadelphia during a strike of sanitation workers and an infestation of rats, the story is narrated by Kiley, a young woman struggling to make ends meet with the help of her half-sister, Nora. They want to build a life of their own but to do so, they need resources beyond what they can earn in a low-wage economy. So they sometimes operate on the wrong side of the law, taking side gigs as couriers of illicit substances to Atlantic City. This is supposed to be a temporary expedient, to save up some seed money to start a legitimate business and begin afresh. From the outset, though, Kiley’s motives are more personal than practical:

“I’m here for my sister […] because the worst things happen to her when I’m not around […] I tell her I’ve bought into her grand scheme—her goal of stepping away […] but I’m really here because I love her more than reason and sound judgement and all the scoldings of my better angels.”

Kiley and Nora have each other’s back. Of the two, Kiley is the more reflective, while Nora is more extroverted and prone to outbursts. It’s their complicity and absolute trust, more than an accidental blood relation, that makes them sisters. They form an effective team.

Narrated in sixty brief chapters which sometimes rely on quick cuts, cinema-style, the plot is punctuated with dramatic bursts. Smith toggles adroitly between Kiley’s interiority and the external menace of everyday life. During one early scene, when Kiley and Nora are stopped by a highway trooper, I had to put down the book and walk around the room for a moment because it was making me too nervous.

For their primary employment, the sisters have jobs as cleaners. They report regularly to the office space of a financial firm to vacuum the carpets and empty the trash after the day shift has gone home. With their tasks comes a certain intimacy:

“I weave past the desks I’ve come to know. The computer screens ringed with Post-it reminders. The ones where the staplers and tape dispensers are always positioned just-so. The framed photographs, weddings, vacations, children beneath Christmas trees. This still space and the vacuum’s hum, and in the windows, my reflection.”

This is Kiley’s space, too, though she lacks the salary or status of the employees who work here by day. She observes matter-of-factly that the “daily current of millions” that run through these offices and the “deals made with oligarchs” are part of “a network as dirty as our runs to Atlantic City.”

A twist of circumstances brings Kiley to a new job at the Academy of Natural Sciences. At first blush the work is menial, as she lacks training and education and spends her hours unpacking boxes. But the Academy quickly because Kiley’s space, too, and a source of further reflection. Standing in front of a diorama that display mountain sheep balancing on precarious ledges, she muses:

“I don’t long for money. I don’t long for a man to rescue me. I don’t long for anything—and I can’t tell if this makes me feel peaceful or empty, and if I’m not filled with something, am I any more alive than this hallway’s animals?”

Here and elsewhere a spiritual awareness informs the story, even as the sisters fight their way forward in a relentlessly material world. The rat infestation in their neighborhood is a grisly problem for its own sake, but as in Albert Camus’ The Plague, where rats also figure prominently, the animals oblige a reassessment of human society, and reveal the fragility of its founding myths. A demagogue named Miller is keen to exploit the infestation with an aggrieved political discourse of “Us and Them.” His followers revel in busting up encampments of the homeless and junkies, in the name of “right and wrong.” Anger is an ideological currency, and for Kiley and Nora, its expression by men is especially threatening. Kiley thinks back on an old boyfriend:

“Perhaps I should’ve stayed with Hank […] but whenever I soften on him, I cycle back to the final-straw night I decided to leave. An eavesdropping on him and his friends. Their conversation uglier with every beer. The tribalism that ran deeper than their allegiance to the Phillies and Eagles. The anger of talk radio. A flag-waver’s love-it-or-leave it rhetoric. The meanness to be found in neighborhoods haunted by guys like Hank and his crew. Guys who feel cheated. The belief they were born at the wrong time […]

Smith puts his finger on the predicaments of a generation for whom the optimism and complacency of their boomer predecessors are foreign concepts and frankly untenable. For Kiley, “ordinariness feels like a miracle” and her longed-for luxury is hope.

We all live in our bubbles, we are told, and there is truth to that notion, but in (step)sisters, Smith depicts something more subtle, akin to a Venn diagram. Kiley simultaneously inhabits multiple bubbles, or more precisely, circles, which sometimes overlap. The grim striving of mean streets and the intellectual activity at the Academy and the financial forces of the office high-rise are all constitutive of her consciousness.

This is a powerful novel that refuses easy answers while at the same time resisting a deterministic naturalism or an exhausted nihilism. (step)sisters is the work of a thoughtful and generous imagination.  

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Charles Holdefer’s next novel, Move the Mountain, will be published in April 2027.

 

by Charles Holdefer

The Coast of Everything by Guillermo Stitch

The appeal of risk-averse storytelling is undeniable. “Cozy” refers to more than a subgenre of mystery writing: it can reflect a more general attitude, a reading posture that prizes the familiar, the safe, the fashionable. In effect, cheering for a team. A team can take many shapes: for instance, as fans of a particular genre, or as tenured specialists with a career to grind. Or as hipper-than-thou media opinionators who lay down the law for the rest of us. These line-ups are diverse, but they all share, despite their differences, a common suspicion of stories that upset expectations.

We could all do with a bit of soothing, I suppose, but we can also imagine other ways to play the game. Truly memorable books aspire to be more than non-allergenic toys. “Safety first” is not a precept for ambitious literature. Guillermo Stitch’s The Coast of Everything (Sagging Meniscus, 750 pages) can be described as a novel that is eager to push past guardrails. This is not the work of a team player, unless one imagines an altogether different kind of contest allowing an individual to play simultaneously on different, or even opposing, sides. Continue reading →

by VN Alexander

The Day Aunt Gina Came to Town by John Schoneboom

The Day Aunt Gina Came to Town (Round Fire Press, 200 pages) is not about the day Aunt Gina came to town; she only arrives on the last page. The story is about the fun that novelists have making things up, specifically inventing the backstories for characters and providing commentary on the thoughts that make characters seem interesting—even though their lives are in fact dull. The playful omniscient narrator makes this novel more than interesting. It’s fascinating, hysterical, and witty. Continue reading →

by U.R. Bowie

The Girlie Playhouse, by V.N. Alexander

V.N. Alexander, The Girlie Playhouse: A Novel, N.Y.: Heresy Press (Skyhorse Publishing), 2025, 239 pp.

Mothers and Daughters

We begin with the dedication page: “To Tricia, my mother.” This would be not a particularly noteworthy dedication except for the main theme of the book. For this novel is not one more Fathers and Sons; but it is one more Mothers and Daughters. The main character is the narrator, known only as Pixie; we never learn her real name. Pixie’s personality has been molded almost in toto by one central event: the murder of her mother when Pixie was only four years old. “Ever since the day Mother died, I have been dancing, always naked, usually alone, even on the days I don’t go into the cabaret . . . Dancing works on me like a favorite perfume: when I smell the Iris 99 Mother wore on that day—so vivid, so compelling—the whole episode is replayed . . . I dance as if no one were watching, as if I were completely alone and nothing mattered, nothing at all . . .” Mad dancer as narrator. Will this narrator prove somewhat unreliable? You guessed it.

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by VN Alexander

Animal by Alan Fishbone

Although Animal: Notes from a Labyrinth by Alan Fishbone (Heresy Press, 111 pages) observes many of the conventions of the novel—representing life thematically, describing characters in Dickensian detail, and drawing upon classic literature as a guide to interpretation—it is, properly speaking, a diary.  The reader must grant the writer the leeway to record unresolved episodic events and to introduce characters who never cross paths and to allow some jotted down thoughts to stand alone as chapters.   Continue reading →

by Vic Peterson

Fox Fires, by Wyl Menmuir

Not all dystopias are futuristic. A discomfiting part of Wyl Menmuir’s Fox Fires (pages) is that it could plausibly happen now. The plot centers on Wren Lithgow, who has followed her mother, a concert pianist, around cities in Europe for two decades, much of her lifetime. Their journey takes her to the city-state of O, an amalgam of many continental European cities, vaguely eastern, yet not a place one might find on any map. Wren was conceived in O, and hopes to find her absentee father there. 

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by VN Alexander

Drift by Craig Rodgers wins Dactyl Award

Nominated by Charlies Holdefer with this excellent review, Rodgers’ novel, Drift delivers what the title promises. The hero of the story is a traveling Bible salesman who is unclear about the purpose of life and slides, with the lubricant of drink and cards, into the abyss.

The novel is written in the style of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, if McCarthy were to write a Coen Brothers screenplay, with maximal scenic description and elaborate stage direction guiding the actor’s motivation and thoughts.

“Vast signs stretch over streets to form crude tunnels in whose shaded interiors trespass mortal wanderers. One sign stands beside and not over the expanse of street, a mammoth billboard seemingly related to none of its squalid surroundings and decorated by its single cryptic word. JESUS. Vultures line telephone poles, one after another looking down on the world and somewhere nearby something is dead.”

The close third person narration knows more than the character who studies a woman he is about to seduce,

“Two hours of white knuckles among the dizzying fray of impromptu midday traffic leads to this place and this moment, untold variables aligning to allow now to transpire. He watches the secretary in the glow of her monitor. She reads things she’s read once, twice already, lips moving with the words so that for fractions of a thought there appears a glimpse into that mouth, that dark place where those whispered words are born. He sees in her the ephemeral trace of all loves that a ghost of memory touches, the pang of the past that means something underneath the skin. He sees hot summers and movie theaters and grass more green than grass could possibly be and he loses himself for just a second and no more in the velvet fall of that memory’s hold.”

If religion were the only thing that gave life purpose, it’d be easy to drop into nihilism, but in Rodgers’ prose there is a Wallace Stevens-like intoning that turns his art into a philosophy, upon hearing a

…banshee howl that scrapes away the lucid layers of the mind. The infant imagination underneath understands this subhuman sound not at all but accepts it with the immediacy of the truly unbiased.

Those quotes speak for themselves. Congratulations to Craig Rodgers, thanks to Charles Holdefer, and my apologies to Dactyl Review readers for the four-month delay in deciding this award. There were many excellent books to consider and I am a very slow reader.

VN Alexander

by VN Alexander

Audition by Katie Kitamura

I found this novel because I’ve become interested in the “weird girl” sub-genre of literary fiction and Audition by Katie Kitamura was suggested by Forbes as one of the best of 2025. Weird girl lit usually features a young woman who “embraces her alienation from the world.”  

Having been thus set up in my expectations, I was disappointed to find that the female (unnamed) narrator of Audition is not weird.  But like so many New York actresses, she is neurotic. Her life, husband, son, friends and New York apartment all fit very neatly within the stereotype of a female in theater. Her struggles are the garden-variety domestic and work-related kind. She is worried about turning fifty; she and her husband have grown apart; their adult son moves back into their small apartment.  What is unusual (but not weirdly cool) about the narrator is the way she narrates, in excruciating detail, all the intentions and unexpressed feelings of other people.  She suspiciously reads the minds of her husband and son, even a passing waiter or strangers sitting at an opposite table. Here is the opening scene:

The host asked if I had a reservation. I said that I was meeting someone and indicated the young man seated at the back of the restaurant. Xavier. It occurred to me that the host must have been the person to seat him at the inhospitable table, and I saw a flicker of surprise cross his features as I pointed. He looked quickly from my face to my coat to my jewelry. It was my age, above all. That was the thing that confounded him. He gave a tight smile and asked me to please follow him. 

Kitamura writes in the close first-person.  If I were her editor, I would have found myself asking, Have you considered using the omniscient point-of-view?  

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by Vic Peterson

The Book Censor’s Library, by Bothayna Al-Essa

Translated by Ranya Abdelrahaman and Sawad Hussain

Book reviewers of “dystopian” novels often focus on how well iconic authors “predicted” our current world of mass surveillance, alternate realities, and grinding political crises. This helps determine whether they are classics. Orwell foresaw a forever-war of three great powers. Huxley anticipated mass-drugging of the populace. Margaret Attwood’s fear of male power hegemony crushing women’s autonomy and human rights still feels acute.

Then comes the inevitable, punctilious criticism of the iconic author for having forecast incorrectly. Orwell’s totalitarian state has been overtaken by a less comprehensive but more efficient model of regional autocrats. Huxley missed the rise of computers and the digital revolution. Attwood’s dark vision is limited by the unconscious biases of the feminism of the 1980s. 

Such tea-leaf reading makes Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library (Restless Books, 261 pages) refreshing; it is couched as a fable, blessedly free of futurism. Yet it is biting, partly because of its uncanny charm, and partly because it is aimed at one contemporary autocratic regime, the Emirate of Kuwait. Al-Essa leaves little wiggle-room that the target of her satire is a living example of authoritarian power—and an example that becomes a stand-in for any authoritarian state. 

Continue reading →
by VN Alexander

The Dactyl annual award returns

The last “annual” award was given in late 2019. The lockdown and rollout were unsettling for everyone. I felt it keenly. After that, I was tapped to work full time as an editor for a political/health related publication. I was distracted. That’s not much of an excuse, but it’s the only one I’ve got.

I will be considering all the books that were nominated in the interim. I thank all the reviewers who kept the reviews coming while I slacked.

[Update Jan 30th: I am still reading through nominees. The decision has been delayed due to the fact that some of the books, from very small presses, were hard to get and one coming from overseas was lost in transit. I anticipate a decision mid February.]

For more information about the award see this page.

If you would like to donate, please follow this link.

Best,

V. N. Alexander, editor