Lake Effect

2024 Winner of The Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Lauren Groff

Wild places and hidden urban spaces exert a gravitational pull inLake Effect,the debut story collection by Hillary Behrman. On the surface of an ancient bone-dry lake, amidst pockets of urban wilderness, on top of unmapped mountain ridges, and in cities ranging from Seattle to Istanbul the characters in these stories are always on the move but rarely headed to where they want to be. Viv's tenuous grip on reality is shattered when she is forced to leave her desert outpost. Paula's real and dream life become indistinguishable. Oliver can't shed the hold of family lore as he negotiates his love affair with Daniel. Siblings, Alex and Marcie, are comforted and scraped raw by intimacy as they traverse the years from juvenile vandalism to a labor and delivery gone terribly wrong. Miles searches for his mother in a homeless encampment beneath a maze of freeways. And in the aftermath of her mother's death, Sam finds herself on a frozen lake miles from shore with a virtual stranger. These stories exist at the intersection of social isolation and fierce intimacies and call into question the limits of our well-intentioned efforts to care for each other.