The Unsettling

by Peter Rock

A stunning, Poe-esque collection of short fiction about outsiders, lost dogs, romance, and life’s surprising mysteries.

Populated by strangers, ghosts, and other shadowy figures, the thirteen stories in The Unsettling attend to those startling moments when what we have understood as familiar is suddenly revealed as mysterious and foreign.

A lonely man saving library books from an outbreak of mold listens to a coworker’s tale about a blind woman and imbues it with his own sense of romance; a woman drives a Gold Firebird through the desert with a television playing “Rockford Files” reruns on the passenger seat; and a girl returns to her childhood home to spy on its new inhabitants, not realizing they are aware of her surveillance.

Told through Rock’s imaginative and wholly original voice, these are haunted tales about fascination, transformation, and the relationship between the two.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Literature

200 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Peter Rock was born and raised in Salt Lake City. His most recent novel, Passersthrough, involves a murder house, a fax machine, communications between the living and the dead, and a mountain lake that moves from place to place. He is also the author of the novels The Night Swimmers, SPELLS, Klickitat, The Shelter Cycle, My Abandonment, The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves and This Is the Place, as well as a story collection, The Unsettling. Rock attended Deep Springs College, received a BA in English from Yale University, and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He has taught fiction at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Deep Springs College, and in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. His stories and freelance writing have both appeared and been anthologized widely, and his books published in various countries and languages. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and an Alex Award, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is a Professor in the English Department of Reed College. Leave No Trace, the film adaptation of My Abandonment, directed by Debra Granik, premiered at Sundance and Cannes and was released to critical acclaim in 2018. His eleventh work of fiction, Passersthrough, will be published in early 2022.

Reviews

[Daisy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another set of American short stories that I didn’t like but didn’t hate as much as contemporary ones; the writing is a step above, the characters more rounded and the settings better drawn but essentially they still set out to create a vignette that is so strange and unbelievable you wonder what was its purpose. A woman drives a firebird, tops up with gas knowing she can’t pay and gives a massage as payment, and we find out she is a big fan of the Rockford Files. Maybe being English the meaning of that show is lost on me but the whole story was a nothing. Stories full of strange (not supernatural just odd) things happen that no one comments on and after a few pages the story just peters out.
Chekhov said something along the lines of, if you introduce a gun in act one you'd better have it go off by act 3, and I suppose my issues with these stories is there are numerous guns introduced but never darken another page.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the voice behind the stories; a bit of a mystic and also a grim realist. I haven’t read much in this genre (modern horror, I guess, or at least supernatural) but liked his imagination. One of the essays was a sad one about a couple who made love on a forest floor, and then had an unsettling encounter with a murderous couple; it was creepy and eerie especially since I could see myself there. The interesting ending actually had the woman save the day by killing the potential killers. From his web site:
“His fictional world is anything but ivory tower. Both his novels are about loners, people living on the fringes of society searching for something--snakes, power, connection, spirituality. The characters sometimes confound the reader; it's hard to grasp what they really want out of life. Rock likes it this way. He says he's never after "an easy story."”

[Stacie]

I had the pleasure of hearing Peter read a story from this collection. They are far out, and strange, I love it! Because the stories are short, it's great to have, when you don't have time for a whole book.

[Lorrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really liked this Rock book. He again spun some of his characters into the book just a little bit, the trampoline, etc. It was several short stories, all heavy, all entertaining, all definitely a look into the author's mind.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never heard of this author before reading these stories, and know nothing more about him. But this was one hell of a book of stories. I secretly want to give this book 4.5 stars.

[Vivienne Strauss · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an amazing collection of stories, each one uniquely eerily surreal culminating the the final masterpiece at the end!

[Kathy Gilbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took probably several years to savor and enjoy these stories one by one. I love this author and have read several of his novels, would absolutely read any others he writes.

[Caitlin Temme · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very creative and dark.

[Nan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting group of short stories, all with strange and bizarre twists.