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.
