What the Neighbors Don't Know

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Each of the 13 stories in this collection involves a significant event,
usually having to do with a recent or imminent death. As a result, the
overall mood of the stories is one of bleakness. In “The Canoe
Trip,” which concerns the relationship between a son and a father, the
son purposefully sinks the canoe in which his father is lost. In the
surrealistic title story, a father finds a human foot growing
upside-down from his living-room floor. The last three stories (“Why I
Sleep with Waitresses,” Leave Your Guns and Come Home,” and
“Twelve Hundred Feet Above the South China Sea”) are noteworthy for
their portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships within a salesman’s
family, relationships informed by the memory of a son killed in Vietnam.

Rosenkrantz writes in a sparse, understated style, but has an
unfortunate penchant for tacking messages onto the endings of his
stories. In one, a young archer kills a snake with his second arrow (his
first having been stuck in a tree). Filled with remorse, he throws it,
still embedded in the snake, into the water. “The arrow rose once out
of the stream, in a slow, rolling curve, the sun glinting on the damp
feathers, and then disappeared.” Rosenkrantz should have left it
there, with the strong images of the sun, the arrow, and the water. His
addition of a final paragraph (“On his way home, the boy walked past
the willow tree where his first arrow stuck. A few days later, he would
come back and break off the shaft”) serves no purpose other than to
lessen the story’s impact. Careful editing would have made this
collection stronger.