No One Wants to Live Here

In No One Wants to Live Here, Mark Holden turns fantasy and reality inside out, showing us the frail thread that holds them together and the raw edges that our superegos scrabble to keep hidden–the things we would never want to reveal in a million years. But in this world, to quote one of his characters, ‘a million years was up.’ Holden’s sharp, deadpan eye is a seam-ripper that lays bare our tattered, basted-together interiors. –Kate Moses // The mundane and the shocking are neighbors in Mark Holden’s powerful collection of stories No One Wants to Live Here. So are his characters-neighbors who watch one another. They are ordinary people, farmers, prison guards and waitresses, a new mother, a cameraman for a local news channel. But the normalcy ends there, because these ordinary people sometimes get out their arsenals of weapons and kill one another. But then maybe that is normal, too. Writing in sublimely simple prose, stripped bare of any unnecessary flourishes, Holden paints a picture of bland and lonely, so-called ‘ordinary’ lives in which extraordinary cruel acts transpire, and in doing so he shows us how such extreme acts have become irrevocably stitched into the fabric of American life. –Elizabeth Cohen // The stories in Mark Holden’s No One Wants to Live Here are suggestive and sparse, apparently without affect. In conjunction with their startling plots, the effect is one of a dazzling muteness. –Steve Shipps