Modern-day Orpheus sails to hell

“I Cheerfully Refuse” is a modern-day retelling of the myth of Orpheus, the musician who traveled to the underworld to rescue his wife. Leif Enger’s fourth novel is stunning, almost pitch-perfect, with a harrowing tale and beguiling characters.

Narrator Rainy is a bear of a man who lives with his wife, Lark, in a village somewhere between Duluth and Thunder Bay along Lake Superior. Civilization is collapsing, with most money and resources swallowed up by “the astronauts” — that is, billionaires. For everyone else, society is teetering — schools have closed, the economy limps along through black markets and bartering, climate change wreaks havoc. Impoverished people sign six-year employment contracts under the “Employees Are Heroes Act,” only to find themselves serving as guinea pigs for government experiments.

Lark and Rainy make a little money renting out a bedroom, which is how Kellan enters their lives. And when he does, everything falls apart. Kellan is on the run for breaking his contract with the government and maybe for something worse. Weeks after his arrival, disaster ensues, and Rainy flees for his life. He climbs aboard a rickety sailboat called Flower and steers into a Lake Superior storm.

Along the way he picks up a stowaway, a raggedy, resourceful child called Sol, and the two become a team. Their travels make up the bulk of the narrative, and Enger’s writing is at its best here, confident and strong, with evocative descriptions of storms, water and sky.

Rainy heads toward the Slates, where he believes the line between the afterworld and natural world has thinned and where he hopes to reconnect with

Lark. But the fates have other things in mind.

With all its tragedy and darkness, this novel is not depressing; it feels buoyant, like Flower itself. Even when the boat ends up sailing directly toward hell, you also know that Rainy and Sol won’t give up.

“I Cheerfully Refuse” is a rare, remarkable book to be kept and reread — for its beauty of language, its gentle wisdom and its steady, unflagging hope. — Laurie Hertzel, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“The Black Girl Survives in This One,” a short

story anthology edited by Saraciea J. Fennell and Desiree S. Evans, is changing the literary horror canon. The editors have upped the ante with a new collection spotlighting Black women and girls, defying the old tropes that would box Black people in as support characters or victims.

The 15 stories are introduced with an excellent forward by Tananarive Due laying out the groundwork with a brief history of Black women in horror films and literature, and of her own experiences. She argues with an infallible persuasiveness that survival is the thread that connects Black women and the genre that has