Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids: StoriesLeyna Krow2025

That’s the question the women of Leyna Krow’s beguiling, darkly fabulist, new story collection grapple with as they strive to be good mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, wives, and companions in a world that is constantly shifting around them. Set in the Pacific Northwest, these stories blend high concept magic with the sometimes subtle, other times glaring, realities of climate change.

As protagonists contend with doppelgänger babies, hordes of time travelers, finicky ghosts, and neighborhood demons, there lurks in the background the effects of the region’s rapidly shifting environment. There are wildfires, wind storms, unrelenting heat, disrupted butterfly migration patterns, a new plague, and a catastrophe on the slopes of Mount Rainier that reverberates through three generations of a single family over the course of a half dozen linked stories.