Frank O’Connor famously asserted that all stories are about loss—and that this void is very much a part of the human condition. We lose. We lose things. We lose and we are on a search to regain what was lost, or never even realize what’s gone–and then that becomes the problem.
In Andrew Porter’s latest collection of short stories, The Disappeared, the title itself portends the complications of these stories. Things are not just lost. We can read the stories from the corners of this idea, but these stories are different. Maybe the stakes seem a little higher. What is missing isn’t just lost as if it can be in some way found or recovered. No, in these stories, the issue is that what’s missing is long gone, vanished, disappeared.
