River Weather a collection of hard hitting short stories review by Duffy the writer


Cameron MacKenzie, author of River Weather,  a collection of stories that releases December 7th with Alternating Current Press. 

“The stories in ‘River Weather’ manage to be both sensitive and transgressive, socially conscious and hard-edged. MacKenzie captures with exquisite detail the challenges of being a man in a world that’s gone to hell, coping with irresistible urges and impossible expectations. Like the work of Palahniuk and Ellis, these stories are riveting and bleed tensile masculinity. Crisp and hard-hitting, this book will leave you breathless.” —Cliff Garstang, author of ‘What the Zhang Boys Know’

About River Weather

As the D.C. city sprawl moved west along the banks of the Potomac in the late 1990s, what had once been a rural backwater was rapidly transformed into dystopian suburbia of suspicion, greed, and naked self-interest. This collection examines the resulting blends of money, race, and class that have come to define the ongoing metamorphosis of Northern Virginia. In “Kalim Mansour,” a boy trying to understand his father fixates on a mysterious Saudi car salesman. In “Rowdy,” a man who was sexually assaulted by his high school football team still romanticizes their masculine code of behaviour. In “A Non-Smoking House,” two contractors battle the realtors who control their livelihood as the ties that bind civil behaviour to pull tight, and then snap. Each of MacKenzie’s stories in River Weather explores the incommensurable moments that lie at the heart of the shared experience, the yawning gaps that separate us, and our desperate attempts to close them.

Who is Cameron Mackenzie?

Cameron MacKenzie’s work has appeared in Salmagundi, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, and CutBank, among other places. His novel, The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career, was called “poignant, brutal, and beautiful” by Kirkus Reviews, and “visionary” by Rain Taxi. River Weather is his first collection of short stories. He lives in Roanoke, Virginia.

You can read an excerpt from the collection here

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