A woman muses on the influential men in her life, and the enduring significance of white pants. A grisly trial for a murder in which a son witnessed his mother's stabbing forces a juror to come to terms with the absence of her missionary son. A young father tries to resist lusting after his adoptive son's birth mother at a Mother's Day picnic. A widow tends to her mother-in-law's garden to ameliorate their shared grief. In twenty-eight stories that draw blood while making you laugh, Alex Behr's debut collection PLANET GRIM is a vivid, unsettling portrait of the gritty fringes of San Francisco and Portland, where complicated characters long for connection just out of reach. Behr is an idiosyncratic, unpredictable prose stylist with an edge and willingness to cut to the bone that makes her writing, truly original.
