Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars
Bull City Press, 2025
Paperback: 13.95
Genre: Short Fiction, Flash Fiction
Reviewed by Kent Quaney
In his new collection of flash fiction, Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars, Alabama Writers Hall of Fame member Daniel Wallace evokes a sense of loneliness and smallness that leaves a deep and lasting impression of loss and longing. Each piece gives us an intimate and heartfelt view of its protagonist. Be it a story of kidnapping, of death, of a failed first date, of the lonely aftermath of divorce, or of the inability to save a world full of suicidal strangers, each of these finely crafted pieces evokes a quiet sense of separation and loneliness, a yearning to belong that is often heartbreaking in its simplicity and candor. Some a few pages, others a few paragraphs, each builds upon the next to make the collection something greater than the sum of its parts.
The stories are intimate and deeply reflective, generally focusing on only one or two characters and accessing the raw and painful emotions of people whose lives did not turn out as they had hoped. Wallace’s style is alternately sparse and poetic, striking a perfect balance when both are needed. One of the strongest pieces, “Always,” explores the disheartening moment when, mid-intimacy, a man and woman realize they are incompatible. The story is told from the man’s point of view and starts out predictably rooted in his own needs, then brilliantly shifts at their breaking point. He finally sees her, notices her: “She was sad, he could so easily tell she was sad, the way her beautiful, heart-shaped face looked frozen, as if it had never smiled and never would.”
Another standout of the collection is “Mending Fences: The Movie,” in which a young man we know nothing about allows himself to be mistaken for a film star at an out-of-the-way diner, playing it up and crafting a tale of a movie being made nearby that, of course, does not exist. What starts as a light comic piece shifts to an exacting view of pain and loneliness when we learn how grateful he is for “the greatest gift I ever got in my life, to be another man for just a few minutes, to be famous for not being me.”
This profound sense of loss and displacement carries through into most of the stories. Of particular note are “How to Build a Coffin,” the story of a man reflecting on his dead wife as he prepares for her burial, and “Gone,” in which a woman calls 911 to report her husband missing, only to have the operator try to convince her that it was her own fault he left.
As brilliant as many of these pieces are, not all are successful, particularly the few that dive into that weird, absurdist world Wallace so perfectly captured in his famous novel Big Fish. “The Men in the Woods” attempts to say something profound about male female relationships by showing us a group of country club types banished to a camp in the woods by their wives, but falls flat, and “Snow” shows us a mother who literally disappears in the snow looking for her errant son in what feels like an allegory rather than a fully developed story. These misses still contain beautiful imagery and sentence work, though, even if the stories themselves don’t quite land.
The collection ultimately succeeds, even soars, through its simple humanity, its quiet loneliness, and in its sparse and beautiful prose.
Kent Quaney’s novel One Breath from Drowning was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2022. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications, most recently The Los Angeles Review, The McNeese Review, and Bull. He currently teaches at Auburn University Montgomery where he is Creative Writing Coordinator.
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