Mike Alberti's impressive "Some People Let You Down" won the 2020 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. His stories take place in upstate New York; at a hobo convention in Erie, Pa.; in Michigan's Upper Peninsula; in Sims, N.D., and Woods, Kan.
A ghost town where buildings and houses "sag and buckle in the wind," Woods figures in four stories. The town acts as a literal and figurative touchstone for the lost, a place for possible redemption.
Though not yet deserted, other failing towns appear in the stories. A community near Cooperstown, N.Y., suffers a plague of caterpillars. When the pestilence stops, the narrator remarks, "Somehow, the whole town seemed a little shabbier than we remembered, not so quaint as pitiful."
Elsewhere, men die in Vietnam or die emotionally upon returning from Afghanistan, barns on abandoned farms collapse, people drown. During a firestorm in Sims, a pastor recalls a picture he's shown his catechists: "Four huge horsemen riding across the plains and revealing God's awful wrath in their fiery wake." The four horsemen become a subtext in these beautiful stories, which spring from tragedies of war, famine and death.
Whereas some characters in Alberti's book neglect the suffering of others, many — for instance, the teenage Jenna in "Woods, Kansas" — become solicitous of the displaced and downtrodden.
Fleeing a drugged-addicted woman in a deserted house, the high school student returns to help her, though much later. During the intervening weeks, the pregnant Jenna has seen on her own and others' faces the "hopeless, desperate, unappeasable need" she saw on the woman's haunted face.
In "Destiny," another Woods story, a woman police officer discovers a runaway shivering in a hayloft. "Are you hurt? I can help you. Are you okay?" she asks, genuinely concerned.
In the heartbreaking "The Upper Peninsula," a couple return to the Lake Michigan shore each year on the anniversary of their son's drowning. As if to ease the loss, "the moon was calling sadly to the lake, and the lake, listening, was trying to lift toward it." This piece and the earlier "Two Floods" and "Kid Kansas" strengthen the book.
