Still you are possessed by possessions. Even after you dispossess yourself, they turn up in kitchen drawers and cabinets…. from Possession(s) by John Smolens

These haunting stories have a common thread, querying the nature of possessions, from a house that belonged to a grandmother to a person, that which we leave behind, and that which we create, what we own and what we can’t.

In Spies, a twelve-year-old boy befriends an ailing neighbor woman with a mysterious past. “Terrible, unexpected things will happen,” she warns. Whistler’s Mistress imagines the struggle between wife and mistress, each claiming the right to possession. A doubting boy cannot allow that he has any sins to confess. Siblings have a martini, their mother hospitalized after a stroke. One of my favorites, Superior Noir imagines Jay Gatsby coming into bootlegger Dan Cody’s life. “Everybody wants something,” Gatsby knows; he wants it all. Old flames meet up after twenty years. A man on a train becomes entangled with a mysterious couple. A woman visits the childhood home of her grandmother and learns the history of the house her grandmother always fondly remembered. A man deals with his deceased wife’s possessions.

There is darkness in these stories, and disturbing situations.

I was impressed with the writing and the variety of the stories.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.

Possession(s) is a short story collection based around the premise of possession or possessions and their myriad meanings of the word. All the stories have been published previously.

The writing is excellent and I learned later that one of Smolens' previous novels had been nominated for a Pulitzer. He's clearly a master of the short story.

There are so many different stories to choose from but my favourites were Spies (about a boy who befriends a woman (rumoured to be a spy) living in his neighbourhood; The End of The World (about a woman returning to Scotland with her daughter to the place her artist husband committed suicide); True Confession (about a boy trying to work out what it means to confess); Superior Noir (an imagining of the start of The Great Gatsby) and Barney (about a woman and her relationships).

I should warn readers that there are difficult subjects in some of the stories, such as suicide, death and the death of a pet.

All the stories are beautifully written and set all over the world. It is an art to write short stories and few writers truly do the genre justice. John Smolens is one of them.

I would certainly read more by this author and highly recommend this collection.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Michigan State University Press for the advance review copy.