There are short story collections you admire for their range, and then there are collections that feel as if they were built around a private wound. Richard R. Brown’s Holes In The Somewhere belongs firmly to the second camp. The debut is speculative fiction in form: weird, unsettling, occasionally cosmic. But it reads less like a genre exercise than like grief that has been given permission to take unusual shapes. What stays with you is not any single shock or image. It is the sting running underneath everything, the sense that every rupture in reality, every strange intrusion into an ordinary life, is also about something we already know: loss, distance, the fragile stories we tell ourselves so we can keep going.

Brown is a legally blind author from the Pacific Northwest, and that fact matters to the work. His blindness surfaces not as inspiration porn or novelty, but as a natural feature of his fictional world. Visually impaired characters appear throughout the collection, living ordinary and extraordinary lives without fanfare. These are not flashy stories. They are patient ones, and they ask patience in return.

The Stories Themselves

The collection opens in domestic territory, which turns out to be where Brown is most confident. An estranged stepfather has spent years putting himself back together after a divorce and a depression that clearly came close to finishing him. By the time we meet him, he has done the work. He has rebuilt a life, traced his stepdaughter, and is about to reestablish their relationship with his grandchild. He has earned a second chance at something like a family. Then the bathroom wall starts. Brown is careful not to over-explain what happens. The horror stays stubbornly physical and inexplicable, but the emotional logic is precise. The fear here is not really of the supernatural. It is the fear that recovery is temporary, that the life you have reclaimed can simply be taken back by forces that don’t care what it cost you to get there. It is a quiet, devastating story, and it is a strong way to begin.

Not every story works at this register. The piece about college students watching the stars go out one by one is more conceptually ambitious and slightly less grounded. Brown is clearly drawn to the image and to its implications: what do people do with their remaining time when the end is not theoretical but scheduled? The answer he arrives at is messier and more human than you might expect, and the story’s refusal to be cosmic and grand about what is, objectively, a cosmic and grand event is interesting. But it is one of the collection’s less intimate pieces, and you feel the emotional distance in a way you don’t with the domestic stories.

The afterlife story operates on a completely different register and is one of the collection’s most quietly startling pieces. Two souls watch from above as doctors dissect their bodies — clinical, matter-of-fact, unhurried — and argue about where they are headed next. One soul is convinced her sins have disqualified her from heaven. The other pushes back: her transgressions are petty things, she argues, compared to people who have murdered hundreds and presumably face the same reckoning. The theological debate is almost domestic in its tone, working through something enormous the way you might work through a disagreement over directions. Then they watch their own burials — one interred, one cremated — and Brown doesn’t editorialize.

What makes the story land is precisely Brown’s casual presentation of the afterlife, and casual is exactly the right word. He does not treat death as a spectacle or the soul’s persistence as a revelation. It simply is the way the weather is. The horror, if you can call it that, is not that there is an afterlife but that arriving there resolves nothing. You still carry your guilt. You still argue. You still watch what happens to the body you left behind and feel something about it. Brown’s afterlife is not a destination. It is a continuation, with all the same unfinished business intact.

Then there is “Sunday Morning,” which is the collection’s spicy dessert — the one story that made me put the book down for a moment, not from dread but from a helpless, slightly guilty chuckle. A neighbor recounts, in the most conversational tone imaginable, how he took the cremated ashes of her wife — a woman whose dying wish was to be buried under the elm tree in her yard, a wish he flatly ignored in favor of cremation — and tipped them into the neighbor’s gas tank. No grand justification. No revenge plot. No moral framework offered or requested. His reasoning, to the extent it can be called that, is simply that he thought the dead wife would have appreciated the joke. Brown does not pause to condemn this or redeem it. He just proves he also knows how to season a meal.

The bathtub in the forest is one of the collection’s most purely strange images, and Brown is smart enough to know that explaining it would ruin it. A widower on a trail bench tells two young male hikers about the day his wife Jan walked into a barren forest clearing toward an old claw-footed bathtub that had no business being there — drawn by a strawberry scent, undressing with eerie calm, then the bells, then the screaming he could do nothing about because his feet had simply stopped working the moment he stepped off the trail. Brown builds the trap with perfect patience, and when the dark-haired boyfriend accuses the old man of just wanting to scare the boys, the story lets you stand with him for a moment. It sounds plausible. Then the old man says: “Ain’t no way she had enough in her to overflow that tub.”

The final movement is merciless. Four miles up the trail the couple is still arguing — no clearing, no tub, just a paranoid old man — until the strawberry scent floods them both at the exact moment they see the ivory gleam through the undergrowth. One of the boys thinks about his feet. And how they won’t move. Brown stops there, which is the right instinct. The old man’s parting words — “Don’t you just stand there” — hang over the ending like a curse, because the story has already shown us, quietly and precisely, that standing there is exactly what will happen.

The blind man and the alien attack is the story most people will probably want to discuss first, and it earns that attention. What Brown does is essentially subversive: he takes a premise that could easily be played for irony — the blind man who cannot see the threat, who survives by accident — and refuses to play it that way. His protagonist is not oblivious. He is differently oriented. What he senses, what he attends to, the information his other faculties are collecting — all of this conspires to keep him alive not through luck but through a kind of perception the sighted characters never access. It is a gentle but pointed argument about what we mean when we talk about vulnerability, and about who we assume is in danger and who is not.

These are only some of the stops along the way. There are more stories waiting in Holes In The Somewhere. Brown’s speculative element throughout is subtle enough that some readers might not register the book as genre fiction at all. The horror never announces itself; it arrives the way the strawberry scent arrives — pleasant first, wrong second — and by then your feet have already stopped moving. It is a risk, and it works, giving the collection a cumulative stillness, the feeling of having walked a long trail and only now, sitting down, realizing how much ground you covered. Then the closing essay arrives, and you understand where all of it came from.

What Holds It Together

Brown is not especially interested in larger-than-life heroes or clever genre archetypes. His people are parents, students, widowers, children, estranged family members, strangers trying to get through one more day. Because the stories begin so close to the grain of ordinary life, the intrusion of the bizarre feels sharper. The horror often lands hardest because it enters through familiar doors.

What unifies the collection is not a theme exactly — grief, faith, perception, and family are all present, but none of them governs the whole, and not tone either, because the stories range from Gothic to quiet science fiction to something like a fable. What holds it together is a quality of attention. Brown writes as if he is paying very close attention to what it costs to be a person, and as if the strange things in his stories are worth taking seriously because the ordinary things already demand that seriousness. He does not use the uncanny as decoration. He uses it as pressure.

If I had to name the collection’s dominant feeling, I would call it bruised wonder. Not nihilism. Not pure dread. Something more complicated — the feeling of a person who has looked at the worst things and has not stopped looking for meaning in them.

What Doesn’t Fully Land

Not every story in the collection achieves the same depth. The star-extinction piece is the most visually arresting of the science fiction entries, but it is also the most emotionally distant — the characters feel more like representatives of possible responses than fully inhabited people. You understand what each one stands for; you don’t quite feel what they feel. It is the one story in the collection where Brown’s restraint works against him, where the concept is so large that the human beings inside it struggle to hold their own weight.

These are not failures, exactly. A short story collection is allowed variation, and the contrast is as much a testament to Brown’s best work as it is a criticism of his lesser efforts. When you have spent time with the old man on the bench who has been sitting there ever since, warning strangers he cannot save — or with the neighbor who tipped a dead woman’s ashes into a gas tank because he thought she’d appreciate the joke — a story that keeps you at arm’s length feels the gap more sharply. The collection would perhaps have been even stronger at a slightly tighter length. But what lingers is not the distance. It is the stories that got under the skin and stayed there.

The Essay at the End

Brown closes with a personal essay about his father’s death from cancer. It is risky to put something this raw after fiction. It can feel like an explanation, a crutch, a retroactive justification for everything that came before. But it does not read that way. It reads as the source. After spending a collection with broken families, deathbed moments, and the particular grief of things left too late, the essay reveals where Brown was writing from. It does not reduce the fiction to autobiography. It deepens it. The monsters and walls and bathtubs do not become less strange because you now know the grief they grew from. They become more honest.

Holes In The Somewhere is a debut that announces a writer who knows what his stories are for. The horrors here do not exist in a vacuum. They grow out of grief and loneliness and the terror of being unseen or disbelieved. They take the shape of emotional realities we already recognize, then push them one step past the explainable.

That gives the book a real identity. It is interested less in spectacle than in aftermath, less in jump scares than in emotional residue. The stories ask what happens when ordinary life opens into something dark and impossible, and whether people can still find tenderness, meaning, or even a form of grace while staring into that gap.

For readers who like their horror bruised with feeling and their speculative fiction rooted in real human pain, Holes In The Somewhere is a debut worth noticing. It may not shout. It may not sprint. But it does something harder: it settles under the skin, and it stays there.

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