This is the first time I’ve encountered Krow’s work. Having read this, I’ve bought her novel and first collection. That’s how impressed I was.

The collection is an excellent mix of the surreal—a girl octopus has a meet-cute with a boy octopus in a neighbouring cave—the hilarious—time travellers keep popping up in a town in America to save the planet from a world-ending plague—and the bizarre—an adult size newborn (yes, a literal man baby) is babysat by a college friend of the mother and gets pissed (not entirely accidentally) on Bloody Marys. 

The title story, “Sinkhole,” about a stygian abyss found in the backyard of a newly purchased house (it’s why the place was so affordable) that fixes anything thrown into it, has been optioned by Jordan Peele. The story’s ending asks a sinister question that I feel the movie, if it’s made, will address.

Spread across the collection is a suite of six stories—five of which centre on the same family over several decades. The first couple of stories are akin to Krow’s weirder fiction—the first piece sees the baffling appearance of a twin boy lying next to his brother in the crib. The boy is named Nicholas, and in the second piece, we learn he might be able to create things—an Egret—from nothing. But the following three stories shift their focus to climate change and the way the family addresses the climbing temperature conditions that saw the glaciers on top of Mount Rainier melt, leading to a devastating mudslide (which is described in detail in the astonishing “Outburst” the sixth of the linked stories and the only one not to feature the family). 

It’s these linked stories—stories about how a family acts in times of crisis—the fear, the love, the support—that elevate the collection and make it more than the sum of its parts.    

[Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids: Stories is out in January. You can read my longer, much sexier review of the collection in the January issue of Locus.]