Upstart indie press Cash 4 Gold Books (C4G) has had a busy, buzzy entry into American letters. Founded by alt-lit stalwarts Jon Lindsey and Harris Lahti, C4G kicked things off with meme-lord-provocateur Peter Vack’s debut novel, whose cover earned them a rare accolade: a cease-and-desist letter from Care Bears. C4G makes performance art out of ruffling the literati’s (very ruffle-able) feathers. Their website has the gleefully sleazy aesthetic of an internet pawn shop, and they’ve pre-listed their novels on Amazon for $250, because, well, why not.
But don’t be fooled by the blustery smokescreen. Jon Lindsey’s gloriously depraved Body High is the essential text on Los Angeles’s underworld of ineffectual addicts (and sperm bank heists). Harris Lahti’s Foreclosure Gothic is a genre-bending meditation on work, inheritance, and the creative life. Together, the C4G co-founders have chiseled out a niche as indie-publishing’s reigning purveyor of delightfully uncanny Americana, and the antics surrounding the press often obfuscate the simple fact that C4G is publishing (mostly) excellent work. Take Exhibit A: Nathan Dragon’s exquisitely understated debut from 2024, The Champ Is Here. Dragon, like Lahti and Lindsey, has been a fixture on the alt-lit scene for about a decade. His loosely linked collection, centering on the low-simmering dramas of rural life, features an infectious reverence for the natural world and the written word. And as of late last year, C4G has provided us with Exhibit B: David Ryan’s superb sophomore collection, Alligator.
Ryan is one of the most protean, prolific short story writers of the last quarter-century that you (probably) haven’t heard of. He’s placed fiction in virtually every literary journal of note, including those college-run journals charging MFA grads a few bucks a pop for long-awaited rejections: Conjunctions, New England Review, the Cincinnati Review. He’s won two O. Henry Awards, and Roundabout Press published his first collection in 2014, Animals in Motion, thirteen stories of mournful surrealism that drift through his characters’ unconscious desires. He’s also, for what it’s worth, the erstwhile drummer of the Lemonheads.
Alligator is in many ways a spiritual sibling to Dragon’s Champ: their prose shares a practiced lyricism (though Dragon’s is of the more restrained variety) and an aversion to both socially corrosive modernity and environmentally destructive urbanity. In Dragon’s “Woodpecker,” the narrator bemoans the “Big Shot and all the Big Wigs” who “kicked the nature out” of his neighborhood. In Ryan’s “Pickpocket,” a Sixth Avenue summer smells “like the breath of a rancid giant” and sounds like the “metallic groan [of a] giant robot’s arm being twisted off.”
Both writers are also preoccupied with gaps, with characters floating through perpetual interludes. In Dragon’s appropriately titled “Lacunae,” the narrator is “always waiting to feel differently, an air of change, in order to begin.” In Ryan’s “Impossible Object,” eighteen-year-old George leaves the turn signal clicking for miles, even though “he’d never intended to turn, he just wanted the tension of ticking anticipation.” But where Dragon deals with the roiling dramas of bucolic living, Ryan is more interested in calamity: construction workers plummet thirty-four stories, bodies wash up on shore, and cars—so many cars!—portend doom. The ensuing grief suspends his characters in an existential purgatory.
Ryan’s stories are, as you might expect, of the slippery variety; reread a passage and you might just wonder if the words shifted. There’s a persistent haze, induced in part by a blurred boundary between dreams and waking life: for a young boy grieving his father’s death in “Three Dreams,” it’s “entirely and confoundingly unclear” where the “dream ended and memory began.” But the elusiveness is also achieved through a free-flowing narration, as Ryan shifts nimbly between perspectives. The prose features a digressive, associative quality that, to a careless reader, might be mistaken for driftlessness. Narrative threads are less linear than they are synaptic.
Such is the case in “Diorama,” where the narrator, David, interweaves the striking ubiquity of animal death during a long-gone summer—“there had been an unusual abundance of roadkill”—with unsettling recollections from his childhood. He recalls the local Taffy Man, who gave free samples to neighborhood children until, one night, an ambulance appeared outside his home. And there was Steve the Priest, who, apparently, was never guilty of anything but “a lot of porn and kindness.” Then there was David’s architect-aunt in Georgia, whose elaborate scale model of an Atlanta building slingshots the narrative into its ultimate fixation: a local boy who won the state diorama championships.
The meandering Lynchian fable becomes a compressed family saga. David’s first-person narration vanishes, and we’re thrust into the world of the local boy who constructed a model of a famous amusement park, using “blueprints his father brought home from the city archives.” The father, also an architect, later disappears without a trace, and the boy, who never properly grieved, follows his dad’s career path. We’re told that “life moved on, despite [the son’s] plans,” yet when the now-adult boy finds his father’s office cleared out, he longs for an “archive of clues to a wound he’d never actually passed beyond.”
The mystery surrounding his father’s disappearance suspends the boy in grief, giving his life a feeling of Ryanesque liminality. There’s only life before his father’s disappearance and life once his father’s found. If the latter never happens, then life, in effect, never resumes. Such in-betweenness is the norm for Ryan’s characters, and it creates a dazed, hypnotic quality that’s amplified by the dreamy prose, fluid narration, and, occasionally, something akin to mental disturbance. I’m not usually one for pathologizing fictional creations—and something tells me the ever-empathetic Ryan would take issue with such an approach—but there are characters in Alligator toeing the line between sanity and delusion.
That line is thin for the protagonist of “Creature,” whose eccentricities read as fairly benign until you learn of “the demons in the wall.” Her exact circumstances are murky, but she seems to be regrouping from a bad breakup, a rupture spurred by her deteriorating psyche: “I’d gone dangerous,” she says, “[my partner had] grown super careful around me.”
The narrator in “Creature” possesses one of Alligator’s most distinct first-person voices. It’s a criminally overused comparison, but I have to say there’s a murmur of Jesus’ Son in her rambling internal monologue:
I’ve been pacing this room, staring at the hole [the demons have] made—or, that I suppose I’ve made, and I’m trying to understand what went wrong, what I’ve done to make what looks like a round-screen television, one of those old glass screens, swarm with faces and voices flickering. I was sitting Baddha Konasana on the floor. I thought I’d used the right words in the incantation, but I got it wrong, got the mantra wrong, and the living room wall has opened. There’s this hole, and now it won’t close. No matter what I say, there it is, a widening opening swarming with their calm, vital eyes, their bodies circulating.
Amid her unraveling, the narrator awaits salvation in the form of an indeterminate “creature.” It’s “born of surprise,” and will float up “from some incidental abyss.” She tells herself it will soon arrive in the form of “a real job, a real place to stay […] a real life”; there seems to be an ongoing race for the narrator’s sanity between the demons in the wall and the countervailing “creature,” whose appearance connotes “signs of recovery.” When the creature, or something like it, does finally arrive, the story ends at an inflection point: Will our protagonist succumb to delusion or be propelled into recovery? There’s reason for the cynical reader to despair, but there’s also cause for hope.
The narrator in “Creature” has, on some level, taken a wrong turn on the sinuous path to transcendence. Julia, the protagonist of “Apiary,” would likely argue her parents have done the same in the wake of her twin sister’s death. Visiting home with her husband, Doug, and their infant daughter, Julia notices “how strange [her parents] have become” since the tragedy; she resents their “willing descent” into “impoverished darkness.” The parents in “Apiary” are consumed by their daughter’s death. Her absence casts a shadow that often engulfs their surviving child. As in “Creature,” Julia’s parents are awaiting salvation, though they’re placing their trust in a millenarian cult: “Evangelist Burton has said it’s now,” the mother tells a distraught Julia, who’s unable to reconcile how her formerly secular parents can believe “they’ll truly lift into the sky.”
Here’s the thing: Julia’s parents actually do lift into the sky. A bee infestation has converted their barn into a de facto apiary, and as Julia and Doug are waving goodbye, the barn “groans and collapses;” a “swarm, like smoke, explodes from splintering broken wood.” Julia’s parents are at the center of the swarm, ascending to heaven in a phantasmagoric flourish that, in my mind, represents one of Ryan’s more trying tendencies: stories needlessly creeping into the supernatural. It may seem like nitpicking in a largely extraordinary collection, but Ryan’s best stories are the ones that have a foot straining for the ground, rather than gleefully departing our world entirely. “Creature” ultimately works because of the protagonist’s ongoing battle to maintain, or perhaps rediscover, her earthly grounding. “Apiary,” like Julia’s parents, shirks reality and evaporates into the sky.
Luckily, the stories in Alligator are impeccably sequenced, and the gothic tendencies in “Apiary” are followed by refreshingly dirty realism in “Black Sun.” The story is narrated by a charmingly inept, painfully dedicated seventy-four-year-old rent-a-cop. Find him cruising by, decked out in homemade accoutrements:
The small United States flags, one each rising from the four corners of the Crown Vic—standard issue Memorial Day fodder, any party supply discount bin off-season. Nice, patriotic touch. I’ve taped a few layers of clear packing tape over the flag cloth to weatherproof and give them a starched and pressed effect. These flags are always stiff and clean, always at attention. And then, the DEPT. OF HOMELAND SAFETY badges on the sides? Magnetic. Fleischmann’s Trophy Supply, custom order. They aren’t cheap, but look at them and tell me with a straight face they aren’t worth every penny.
The deadpan bravado is good for some of Alligator’s best laughs; the narrator in “Black Sun” occasionally reads like the kind of bumbling Midwesterner you’d find in a Connor O’Malley or Tim Robinson sketch. But the advanced age imbues the character with a certain pathos, as do the repeated mentions of his measured restraint. His security job at the local Friendly’s “clocks in at minimum wage,” and his free end-of-shift dinner is “the only meal I allow myself because of the austerity plan.”
Slowly, the impetus for the belt-tightening materializes. Our narrator was pushed into early retirement and a “significantly” reduced pension package by his outsourcing company: “The whole enterprise reappeared far away in some rehabbed fishing village in a country named Indochina back when I was a young man.” A comedy of flyover-country manners becomes a lucid meditation on postindustrial decline. Our narrator is smiling his way through abject poverty:
I learned how you could draw the most out of your food by simply trying to remind yourself there were people far worse off—electricity, heating, it was all about daylight, the occasional votive candle, layering in the colder months, the dollar store for the darndest things. The soup kitchen on Sundays, and then, eventually, Saturdays too. It was about attitude, developing a mental conveyance, projecting the things that were important to you into your life. Self-determination. Prayer.
Ryan hardly indulges in his protagonist’s abjection, even in the most dire of states: knocked out cold on the pavement of the Friendly’s parking lot. He’d been pursuing a dine-and-dasher when he was struck with “sudden white-blindness,” a “swift rocket-like surge in my body.” Enveloped by a concussion-induced hallucination—and this is clearly framed as a hallucination rather than some kind of quasi-mystical voyage—his mind drifts to a woman whose “silken,” “honey ladled” voice comes over the (presumably pawned) police scanner on occasion. He often fantasizes about meeting her, and, amid his dreamy haze, he gets his (imagined) chance. They’re “in the open air atop a roller coaster,” and they “hootchie-cootchie all over the plastic seats.” He revels in the “constriction of her manic flesh, the lavender jiggle of blouse and hair.” “I am here for you,” he tells her. “I can’t say I understand just why we’re suddenly both trapped up here right now, but we’ve got our entire lives to figure that out.”
The encounter—hallucinated though it may be—is gorgeous, and moving, and it provides the kind of fleeting transcendence Evangelist Burton and Co. could never understand. It’s the climax of what is, for my money, the standout story in Ryan’s stunning sophomore collection. It pierces to the core of a very flawed character without lapsing into judgment. It’s grounded by the author’s evident compassion for his characters, and by the glimpses of enlightenment he allows them, their downcast circumstances be damned. Alligator can often be mystifying, its fictions registering less as coherent narratives than as bone-deep vibrations, but stay attuned to the bursts of lucidity between the bewilderment: though often consumed by their own morbidity, Ryan’s stories also thrum with tenderness. They tap into a frequency that, at least to this reader, feels a little bit like hope.
Michael Knapp
Michael Knapp's writing has appeared in Dissent, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Full Stop, and elsewhere. He teaches at College of the Canyons.