Sinister Grin Press / March 2017
Reviewed by: Vince A. Liaguno

With A Soundless Dawn, Dustin LaValley has crafted a lean collection of 41 flash fiction and short stories that defies classification—a blend of horror and neo-noir and literary fiction that’s as eclectic and wholly original as anything you’re likely to find on bookstore shelves. LaValley masterfully plays with story structure, allowing him to toy with readers’ expectations. The offerings in A Soundless Dawn never let the reader commit, like a ride through the dark that turns sharp left when you expect to go right—a literary Space Mountain.

The collection has a discernible rhythm—like literary music set to a beat of two micro-shorts punctuated by a proper short story. Some of the tales here have a vague whiff of autobiography; others are relentlessly bleak, with an air of unrequitedness being one of the more pervasive themes. LaValley executes a cunning examination of the human condition—sometimes in a mere sentence or two—exploring the tolls of homelessness, drugs, lust, displacement, insomnia, and violence on the soul. Most of the stories in A Soundless Dawn eschew focus on the outward effects of these things and concentrate on what they do to the essence of a person. And therein lies the strength of LaValley’s deceptively slim collection.

The best tales in A Soundless Dawn are disorienting (“Picture-in-Picture,” “Awake and Dreaming”) or the superb “Used,” in which the unnamed narrator’s heightened olfactory senses tell the story of a used book’s former owner.

“Sand Bucket”—which is both jarringly out of place here and perfectly suited for this collection—is a gorgeous short story about a little boy’s imaginary friend that manifests in a bucket of sand. It’s a heartbreaker that will sucker punch you with its emotion as it explores, first, the anguish of parents trying to cope with a child’s mental illness and, then, their acceptance of it. It’s a heartrending, elegiac tale about unconditional love and the standout of the collection.

In his introduction to A Soundless Dawn, Edward Lee posits that formula in genre fiction equals familiarity; consequently, familiarity equals trust. Readers will find little formula here, even less familiarity, and almost nothing tangible to trust in LaValley’s capable hands. Like other contemporary literary outlaws—I’m thinking of Dennis Cooper’s uncomfortable blend of sex and violence or Joyce Carol Oate’s rejection of the linear narrative or Stephen Graham Jones’ masterful blending of disparate structures and experimental forms—LaValley earns the title handily with this illuminating and genuinely transgressive collection.

Purchase A Soundless Dawn by Dustin LaValley here.