Book Review: Bare Ana and Other Stories

Cover image and design by C.B. Royal.

Robert Shapard’s short fictions barrel down pot-holed roads straight into the unexpected. In his new collection, Bare Ana and Other Stories, the fish are unbuttoned, tattoos start in utero, and it turns out Dad is made out of a burlap bag and a magic marker. You might imagine it would be hard to find your way through his surreal universe, but Shapard deftly tosses the reader right into the passenger seat. Here’s how “Lobster” opens:

“Eddie said to send the lobster first class or whatever it took to get it to Wyoming alive and reasonably happy so they could boil it to death there.”

Boom. Here we are, rattling along with Shapard wherever he might be heading. And while the destination might not appear on any map we’ve seen before, the terrain feels achingly familiar, the characters all too human.

There’s plenty of humor and unease and tenderness woven into the twenty-three narratives included here. And they sit well together, though it’s hard for me to formulate exactly what binds them as a collection. For me it’s neither the title nor the title story, “Bare Ana,” which is less racy and more surprising than I anticipated. Certainly Shapard’s concise, crackling prose is a unifying force, but it goes beyond that. Perhaps the glue is the way the narrators grapple with the human condition.

Every character in here simmers—most are on the verge of despair or rage or fear or loss, but not quite in the pit. They are lost physically, or in their relationships, or in their own heads, or all three at once, struggling to communicate and find their keys and get to work. But even when the outlook seems grim, there is a lingering feeling of giddiness, too, of skating in and around disaster without (yet?) plunging headfirst.

As Sherrie Flick said in her blurb for the collection, “In Shapard’s world, it’s always dusk, the light is changing, there’s the before and after of a car crash or dust settling, of illicit love and bourbon tossed back.” Throughout the book, the author reveals the turning points, the moments before the consequences kick in, so that we are left swinging wildly with the protagonist, hanging on and hoping for the best.

In “Best Boy,” an old man lands “ka-thud” in a young woman’s booth at an LA diner. As the two talk in parallel conversations and thought patterns, the narrator is by turns charmed and terrified by his presence. When he asks for a ride—says his wife Evelyn would love to meet her—her thoughts begin to spiral:

For a second I went full paranoid, my thoughts racing, Is this what he tells people? Evelyn wants to meet you? To get you in the car so he can stab you to death?

His smile had grown wide. It seemed to me like death, his teeth tilted, like old gravestones. Leaving with him would be abandoning your life, I thought.

But they do get into her old Ford Pinto, taking off for destinations unknown.

I recommend that you get in as well. It’s an exciting ride.

Bare Ana and Other Stories, Robert Shapard. Regal House Publishing, LLC, 2025. One of the stories, “Glyph,” appeared previously here in 100 Word Story.