4 out of 5

One Story has been great for discovering writers with whom I was previously unfamiliar, or allowing me to appreciate writing in a genre I’d otherwise not care about.  But as I continue to toil away on stories I’d love to one day get publish in the mag (yes, at all, but I’d double love to be in One Story), I’ve noted I rarely see the bios telling me that I’m reading so-and-so’s first work.

Lo: ‘Catacombs’ is Jason’s first published story.  He’s worked in newspaper; he’s got an MFA, but it’s his first published story.  And I loved knowing that as I was reading it, as I was appreciating how it ducked and weaved through its topic.  It’s easy to nitpick the newbies for forced narrative devices or clumsy structure, but it’s also easy to overlook how often established writers pull the same nonsense; ‘Catacombs’ isn’t perfect, but it’s also not an easy nitpick – Jason’s writing is confident, has its own voice, and the author is smart enough to make us feel something without giving us a pat beginning, middle or end.

The story concerns that of a missing child, but as the narrator makes clear to us upfront: there’s no final hour resolution.  His brother is gone.  Here are some memories, here are some events that happened around the disappearance, during a family trip to Mexico, and here’s some snippets of what happened later.  Zencka has his lead open up to us about the malleable nature of these thoughts, and how he’s aware some of them are nonsensical but that they become their own form of truth.  And thus without directly saying so, or even having to underline it, Jason has us thinking about our own lives, and perhaps past tragedies or regrets.  This effect of wrapping the reader in, of getting us invested – whether done via cliffhanger in an action tale or in the subtle fashion of ‘Catacombs’ – is certainly the goal of most entertainment fiction, and that’s where a lot of those aforementioned nitpicks come into place: cheap devices to keep us hanging around or to throw a rug after the cracks in your narrative.

There’s an amusing anecdote that leads off the story, told omnisciently, and although it’s Jason’s way of making the actions of the brothers make more sense when we switch to the first person recounting, I did find the sudden shift in tone rather jarring, and almost disappointing – cause you’d like to keep reading anecdotes like the first one – but as the bulk of the story picks up, the disappointment is soon dismissed.