Reviewed by Will Borger

We're used to violence. It consumes our media. We flock by the millions to theaters and streaming services to watch men and women in tights solve their problems by punching them. We flip on the TV to watch bad cops break the rules to get results, eagerly download podcasts that delve into the details of grisly murders. Whatever the medium, violence fills our eyes, our ears, our minds. It has become our entertainment.

But it is bloodless, in a way. We have no skin in the game. No fear. Many of us are insulated from any real threat of violence, and our consumption of it—and subsequent desensitization to it—has made us forget something: violence is fast, ugly, and brutal. It says more about what's going on in and around someone than the act of violence itself. Exploring something so nuanced and complex and doing it well is a tall order. But that's exactly what Miah Jeffra attempts in The Violence Almanac, a collection of 12 short stories that, in some way, deal with the threat of violence, though not always in the way you might think.

The first story, "Growl," which also serves as the collection's forward, establishes a constant that flows throughout the collection: need. A growl is an expression of need, whether from an empty stomach or a dog. In Jeffra's words, a growl represents "a promise" of action, of an act that will or may happen should events continue as they are, "an about to." And it is in these about to's, these precipices, that we erupt into action, for better or worse, good or ill. We are chasms of need.

Stylistically, Jeffra experiments with narrative convention from the jump. I never knew what to expect from The Violence Almanac, which kept me keen to keep reading just to see what other tricks Jeffra had up his sleeve. Whether I was getting interesting points-of-view, working through an unorthodox format, or being asked to consider an interesting question, the collection kept me hooked throughout.

In "Babies," a story based on Andrea Yates, who drowns her children in a bathtub, Jeffra switches between several points of view—Yates, her son Noah, her husband, a biographer—and plays with the format of short fiction. He breaks the story into titled chapter-like segments and writes parts like a screenplay, emphasizing the fictional nature of what I was reading and allowing me to fill in the gaps between dialogue segments in a way that wouldn't work in traditional prose. The story, especially the sections told from Noah's perspective, are suspenseful and horrifying. Andrea Yates' need is clear: to be free of her children, even if just for a moment. But in a world where she feels she can't express that need, she turns to the only course of action available to her.

Jeffra plays with structure throughout the collection, most notably in "Gethsemane" and "Faultline: Coffee Spilled," shorter pieces that serve as interludes, breaks between the meatier stories. While the former is probably the collection's weakest point, it's also the most interesting structurally. Essentially, it is an extended monologue from the perspective of a realtor trying to sell a house to a couple. The more the narrator speaks, the more terrible the history of the place becomes. The story feels like commentary on a number of things: gentrification, the Church, domestic violence, the secrets that hide in the walls of every building that no one wants to know but all places have.  It shows how violence can infect the history of a place, a community, and the people who reside within it, something that would be invisible to someone who wasn't familiar with it, and with time, would fade away.

"Faultline" is better. Told from multiple perspectives that shift several times, the story examines how a single act, born of a combination of accident, love, and concern, can shape our lives. How a desire not to be left can cause as much damage as any other need, how the things that shape us are accidental and incidental. It questions what would happen if "stories of forgiveness wrote themselves as urgently as stories of anger."

Jeffra's prose shines on the page in many areas. "Jingle-Jingle-Pop" is perhaps the best story in the collection. It follows Lalo, a transgender sex worker desperate to save enough money for gender confirmation surgery and leave a chaotic life behind her after one of her friends is murdered. It's one of the few stories in the collection written in first person, and Jeffra captures Lalo's voice in stunning, beautiful prose while navigating her attempt to escape her life, and hopefully, find acceptance somewhere else. At one point, she remarks that one of the men she's with was probably a nice guy "before his dreams [were] taken away, too. Isn't that how it is, why we all get so nasty?" Jeffra's examination of sexual violence, the struggle for acceptance and identity, and how trauma impacts who we are make it an often a difficult but rewarding read, and one that hasn't let my mind since I finished it.

"Footfall" and "Been Cut" showcase Jeffra's ability to inhabit the point of view of children. In "Footfall," a young boy named Corey compares his failures with his friend Mikey, who "wouldn't hide under the covers until he fell asleep" when his parents fought. In "Been Cut," brothers Noah and Mason bond over the way they miss their mother, something they can't openly say in front of their father, and pinky swear their promises to one another.

Both stories ask similar questions. Who are we when we can't depend on the people we love? How far would we be willing to go to get the validation we need, no matter how small? Would you shoot a man? Steal? Intentionally cause problems? The answers are difficult, much as they are in "Jingle-Jingle-Pop," and both pieces reflect Jeffra's fiction at its best.

Jeffra continues to challenge the reader in "Clips," a story in which the relationship between Andre and the narrator slowly disintegrates as the two of them watch a series of anonymous clips featuring two unnamed men. The mystery—the why, the how, the who—becomes all they consider. As the struggle to communicate deepens, so, too, do the clips become more mysterious, more concerning, and the two can't quite agree on what they mean. "Clips" is the most ambiguous story, and its ending leaves us wanting, like the narrator, "an end to the beginning and the middle." Perhaps that's the point, though. Life never hands us such clean breaks.

Of all the stories in the collection, I connected with "Saving a Bird" the most, particularly when Colin, a younger, less successful man, realizes that his long relationship with the older and much more successful Michael isn't exactly what he wants because he's never really wanted something. Colin's discovery that he has chosen comfort over what he wanted, and what he's lost because of it, is profoundly moving: "So much had gotten away from him in his life, and now that he knew what he wanted—maybe for the first time—he wondered how he could have lived without truly wanting something for so long." But the realization that there is a problem does not fix something. Whether Colin—or we—have the strength to move on from that comfort after such a realization is a question Jeffra wisely leaves us to answer ourselves.

If those stories are about the breaking of illusions, the final story, titled "Afterwards: The Story of Every Living Thing," feels like acceptance, a realization that everything is decaying, dying, will fail, has failed. That everything is a piece of everything else. By the end, the narrator and friends are sitting on a pier, "nibbling our Dippin' Dots—nibbling renegade flakes of skin, sea water, salt, early morning sneezes, fingernail crud, snot, rust, cat hair, dog dander, fly eggs, cum, sweat, pus, shit, fish, ick, toe jam, rotten meat, fungus." And he realizes, despite all this, despite all of it—the violence, the flaws, the disgusting mishmash of everything—it is good. And that is enough.

That realization applies to The Violence Almanac as a whole. It is not a flawless work. But it is moving, thought-provoking, honest, and strong enough that even its faults have merits and are worth experiencing. Kind of like a cup of Dippin' Dots on a pier, even when you know everything you're really eating.