Felver’s writing is sharp and insightful. His stories evoke the style and themes of writers ranging from Richard Russo to Rick Bass to Andre Dubus III and, in the particularly brutal surrealist title story, “The Dogs of Detroit,” Cormac McCarthy. A substantial debut by a promising and confident new writer.
Felver can be inventive with tone, diction and perspective — and heartbreakingly solemn when he wants to be. Both “The Era of Good Feelings,” in which a high-school history teacher, burying his father, appraises his personal past, and “Hide-and-Seek,” in which estranged brothers collide at an airport bar, coolly dissect woe amid death and regret.
