In Scenic Overlook, Anne Ray’s debut novel-in-stories, a young woman named Katie embarks on a long journey after her father’s death. Using the metaphor of the journey, Ray explores how fear and powerlessness rob Katie of her voice, confidence, and direction. Unable to connect with others in any deep way, Katie turns acting her own worst interests into a high art. Her attempts to avoid pain only invite more of it into her life. 

Mimicking the randomness of Katie’s travels, the book’s thirteen connected stories do not follow a chronological order. They do, however, provide  a sense of forward movement and a narrative arc. The reason for Katie’s escape is summed up in in the first story, “Pavement,” when Katie’s older brother Danny tells her, “What you must learn […] is that there is no point in doing anything.” But even in this regard, Katie may be an exception because, he adds, “going nowhere may be your lot in life.” 

Katie’s journey takes her nowhere and everywhere. She procrastinates about returning to college to finish her degree, choosing instead to roll like a tumbleweed across the United States. Her jobs include stints as a camp counselor, a reporter, and a bartender; despite her aimlessness, she works earnestly, with a sense of responsibility. Yet because of her youthful naïveté, she remains unprepared for opportunistic scam artists and other dangerous types, such as the hippie-ish and seemingly kind couple whom she befriends in the title story. They provide security and connection, fostering her trust, until the morning Katie wakes to find them gone with her car. This catastrophic development leads to a bus ride that delivers her into an even more catastrophic situation with a man named Wes, who causes an even deeper heartbreak.  

When Katie does find a real connection, it’s with another young woman, Yahlie, who is also escaping her family. Together they court situations rife with danger and self-destruction. After Katie’s abortion, they meet two men in a bar whom they spontaneously and drunkenly agree to accompany to a wedding reception where a horse bites Katie. Smarting, she climbs to the barn roof where she contemplates death, her abortion, and her bootless desire to admit fear. In another episode, a saleswoman named Bev asks the pair to drive her and her infant to a place unknown to them, where she intends to collect money owed to her by her ex. After they kick in the door, they find not the ex but a legless man in a wheelchair. Katie watches Bev ransack the house, stealing what she believes is hers, all the while dreading the return of the ex, and leaves without helping the wheelchair-bound man. 

Even before Katie’s father’s death, her family had been mired in a grief so deep, it had draped all of them under an isolating blanket of silence. As a teenager, Katie’s sister Amy had died in a hit-and-run accident after sneaking out of the house when she was supposed to be babysitting her siblings. In “Road’s Edge,” we learn about the lasting impact of Amy’s death on the family. It is revealed that the hit-and-run had seemed purposeful, and Amy’s parents had continued to search for the driver long after Amy’s death. 

In these stories, Ray shows how the past can haunt the present. This book snags readers, pulling them into Katie’s fraught journey, inviting them to wince at Katie’s terrible decisions while cheering her good ones, to witness her struggle to overcome grief and come to grips with debilitating loss.   

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A two-time fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Anne Ray was raised in Ellicott City, Maryland, and has worked as a waitress, a gardener, an English teacher, and a fishmonger. She’s a graduate of the Creative Writing program at Carnegie Mellon University and the MFA program in fiction at Brooklyn College. She works as Managing Editor at Reveal Digital, a project of JSTOR, where she oversees several digital archives of radical and historical press materials.

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Rosalia Scalia is the award-winning author of two story collections, Stumbling Toward Grace (Unsolicited Press, 2021) and Under the Radar, forthcoming in 2025 from the same publisher.  Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Oklahoma Review, North Atlantic Review, Notre Dame Review, The Portland Review, and Quercus Review, among others. She holds an MA in writing from Johns Hopkins University and is a Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artist’s Award recipient. She lives in Baltimore City with her family.