Fear of Everything

"In these nine new short stories, John McNally's work takes a fantastical turn, where magicians show up unexpectedly at schools, retirees answer phone calls from lonely children, and sleep study assistants speak to patients about their afterlife experiences. As with McNally's two previous collections, the award-winning Troublemakers and best-selling Ghosts of Chicago, the stories in The Fear of Everything balance humor with poignancy, but McNally stakes out new territories of darkness and absurdity. These stories are of men, women, and children, often lonely, reaching out for a connection, whether it's to prospective lovers using online dating sites or to one's younger self via bygone technology. In the historical story "The Devil in the Details," a little girl's fate is cemented early on by gossip and happenstance; in "The Attorney," a sinister lawyer weaves a tale that plays loose with cause-and-effect. Richard Russo wrote of Troublemakers, "John McNally is an electrifying writer whose stories burrow under the skin. His world becomes our world, his way of seeing, ours. Resistance is futile." Twenty years later, the same is true for The Fear of Everything"--