The stories in Tom Andes’s new collection are often about endings: endings of relationships, of lives, of dreams and delusions. While the stories offer humor in abundance, they unfold in an atmosphere of ominous inevitability. They also reflect a concern with American factionalism—generational, political, cultural, regional—and the misunderstandings it engenders. 

In “Nashville Radio,” the narrator, McBride, is a guy who loads trucks and brags about his “daddy who got kicked off the Grand Old Opry after a frolic with one of the hatcheck girls, who also happened to be a famous record producer’s daughter.” He says that his father also got into trouble in Music City for being a communist. Infused with an insider’s understanding of the music business—Andes is also a touring musician—“Nashville Radio” is a romp through political incorrectness in the heartland (and the guilty amusement we may feel about it). 

Throughout the collection, Andes’s characters make bad decisions. But they come by their frailties honestly, for many are descended from people who did likewise; and they live on society’s margins. For example, Maddie, from the title story, “hadn’t been the hot girl but the hot girl’s cocaine connection, which was the next best thing to being thin and blonde in the social hierarchy of Southern Oklahoma.” It’s a measure of Andes’s skill that his hapless characters are worthy of our compassionate care. 

There is violence, or the threat of it, throughout these fourteen tales. One of these, “Moral Lessons,” features Fitzy, a recent parolee, who plans to commit a crime against basketball’s Celtic Nation: He wants to murder Larry Bird. Fitzy holds Bird responsible for his own gambling losses. When he displaces his rage onto a high school kid working at a pizza joint where Fitzy is stealing soda after (not) paying for water, his friend thinks “what a time to be alive,” a deadpan line that delivers.

“Thanks for Stopping” is written from the point of view of Miranda who returns to live with her sad-sack father in what she calls “Cow Hampshire” after she runs over and kills a child in San Francisco. She’d just glanced at her cell phone when the kid ran into the street, the legal result for Miranda being a stiff fine and no jail time. On her way to a job interview at a Portsmouth big-box store—quite a comedown from her programming gig out West—Miranda sees her ex-boyfriend, Bailey, hitchhiking. “He was everything she’d feared coming back here: the hold the past could have on her, the way you could never escape it.” Overriding her own unease, she picks him up. It’s a mistake: “Twelve years after she’d dumped him and run away to the West Coast, she’d seen him for twenty minutes, and it did this to her, like she was fifteen, cutting herself, helpless again.” In those same twenty minutes, Bailey also manages to steal Miranda’s wallet. Her decision to stop turns out to be a very bad decision indeed.

Other stories, such as “One More Thing I Need to Say to You” and “Golden Memories,” feature men struggling with allegiances to self-destructive friends of their youths. “It Wasn’t Waylon and Willie,” a small powerhouse of a story, begins, “After his father the murderer died […] Bobby Paulson sat on the old man’s couch listening to digitized versions of the cassette tapes Dad had made him years ago.” By the end of the story, Bobby is shaking as he listens, begging his father to stop. In Andes’s stories, you can go home again, but you’ll be sorry.

In “Never Mind in Two Thousand,” selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025, beginnings and endings collide in San Francisco’s Sunset District. A liberal couple moves in next door to a disgraced police officer named Jimmy Bryson. Andes’s description of Bryson’s home, ravaged by his impending divorce, makes an indelible impression: “The living room had spaces like missing teeth where Theresa had taken the furniture she wanted.” Moving day starts with the couple parking their car so that it blocks Bryson’s driveway, then resisting his request that they move it. Cultures clash, and what happens next reflects Bryson’s desperation as a man with little to lose. Suffice it to say you do not want to miss reading this one. 

With this collection, Andes has created colorful and memorable characters who struggle with addiction, outdated beliefs, and their own circumstances and limitations—but his stories are richer than that description may sound. He also does a masterful job of layering his stories so that they expose—without justifying—misogyny, bigotry, racism and other American attitudes that should be, but alas are not yet, kaput. 

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Tom Andes was born in New Hampshire and now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He received his BA in English from Loyola University New Orleans and an MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University. His writing has appeared in several dozen journals and small publications and been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories. He won the 2019 Gold Medal for Best Novel-in-Progress from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society. He is also a musician and has released two critically acclaimed EPs of original music.

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Sarah Holloway lives in Savannah, GA. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly‘s blog, Heavy Feather Review, Roi Fainéant, Emerge Literary Journal, The Argyle, the Ekphrastic Review, Cowboy Jamboree, and elsewhere. She’s @sarahholloway.bsky.social.