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Above an Abyss: Two Novellas

Ryan Masters (Goodreads Author)

4.57 · Rating details · 7 ratings · 3 reviews

Two contrasting tales of suspense anchor Above an Abyss: Two Novellas, Ryan Masters's debut collection of fiction. In Trampoline Games, all is not well among the sharply defined suburbs of Salt Lake City in the summer of 1986. A 12-year-old boy arrives in a land of "mountains, Mormons, crickets" to find baffling prejudice, but also intoxicating freedom, lust, moments of he ...more

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Paperback, 116 pages

Published December 20th 2018 by Radial Books

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Jan 30, 2019 Jack Messenger rated it it was amazing

Shelves: best-books-i-have-reviewed

The epigraph to Above An Abyss, Ryan Masters’ marvellous collection of two beautiful and stunningly juxtaposed novellas, is from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: ‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’ ‘Trampoline Games’ and ‘The Moth Orchid’ approach this idea of existential precarity from entirely different directions, yet the two stories complement one another in breathtaking, unexpected ways.
Rya The epigraph to Above An Abyss, Ryan Masters’ marvellous collection of two beautiful and stunningly juxtaposed novellas, is from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: ‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’ ‘Trampoline Games’ and ‘The Moth Orchid’ approach this idea of existential precarity from entirely different directions, yet the two stories complement one another in breathtaking, unexpected ways.
Ryan Masters seems to relish climatic extremes. His superb short story ‘Irredeemable, Now and Forever,’ published in Catamaran Literary Reader, is pinned next to a highway near the torpid River Humboldt in the blistering heat of the Great Basin in Nevada. In Above An Abyss, ‘Trampoline Games’ tells of the inferno-summer of 1986 in Sandy, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City, where Jacob, the new 12-year-old in town, meets and befriends Finn Levy, a rebellious and eccentric red-haired kid who sports a white lab coat decorated with New Wave buttons. Jacob also discovers the four Hanson girls who live next door. They have a trampoline. He becomes quietly obsessed with Debra, also twelve: ‘The sight of Debra Hanson’s hair flouncing wildly over the fence, the sound of the springs and peals of angelic laughter, it was all too much for me sometimes.’
In contrast, ‘The Moth Orchid’ is set in Fairbanks, Alaska, where it is fifteen degrees below zero. Alasa Memnov maintains an orchid hothouse with obsessive vigilance, while also taking time to visit her mother, Bebe, at a nursing home: Bebe has succumbed to early-onset Alzheimer’s. Appropriately, it is the Russian Orthodox Feast of the Epiphany, before which Alasa dreams proleptically of self-revelation.
The writing in both these novellas is masterfully self-effacing. Nothing is forced and nothing draws attention to itself, yet it is all perfect, natural, necessary. It reminds me of the films of Kelly Reichardt, whose shots and compositions share the same sense of unexpected revelation amid the everyday. Images linger: a crazy drive on a frozen river and a bewildering walk through a maze of snow in ‘The Moth Orchid’; the deafening whirr of the crickets in ‘Trampoline Games’; the abrupt exposure of dangers and cruelties half-buried beneath the normal; and how very strange the ‘normal’ can be – almost, as Jacob asserts, like something from The Twilight Zone.
The novellas reflect one another in subtle ways. They both feature important mothers and absent fathers. Jacob’s mother drinks a great deal and watches game shows. She is not a happy woman and verges on the malevolent (at times reminding me of Allison Janney in I, Tonya). Alasa Memnov’s father died when she was an infant; Jacob’s father is delayed in California while he ‘orchestrates a massive round of layoffs’ at National Semiconductor. There is much humour and bitterness in both works, but in inverse proportion. One senses the possibility, or the fear of the possibility, that characters might simply disappear, absorbed by a landscape or a weird culture, and lose themselves.
Most wonderfully, ‘Trampoline Games’ and ‘The Moth Orchid’ end on entirely unexpected notes of quiet revelation, the reverberations of which continue long afterwards. I do not mean to suggest these endings are somehow bolted on as deliberate surprises. Instead, they are as parts to the whole, with deep roots in the material, but whose blossoming transforms all that has gone before. They are quite remarkable and profoundly moving.
Above An Abyss surely establishes Ryan Masters as a great practitioner of the novella, one of the most difficult and ambiguous of literary forms. Read Above An Abyss and be touched by a quiet moment of grace. ...more

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Jan 09, 2019 Ben Kostival rated it it was amazing

Masters writes with grace and subtlety in ABOVE AN ABYSS of two of the most difficult subjects: boyhood and old age. More, he does so in arguably the most difficult prose form to deploy effectively: the novella. Not for nothing are novellas notoriously maddening to write and publish. Good ones provide a wealth of precise imagery along with mature plots inclusive of character development. Short stories excel at the former, novels at the latter. To be able to craft both dynamics into a single work Masters writes with grace and subtlety in ABOVE AN ABYSS of two of the most difficult subjects: boyhood and old age. More, he does so in arguably the most difficult prose form to deploy effectively: the novella. Not for nothing are novellas notoriously maddening to write and publish. Good ones provide a wealth of precise imagery along with mature plots inclusive of character development. Short stories excel at the former, novels at the latter. To be able to craft both dynamics into a single work testifies to a writer's acumen, and Masters acquits himself tremendously in ABOVE AN ABYSS. The novellas dovetail as a pairing reflective of the book's multifarious binarisms—adolescence vs. senescence, male vs. female, and desert vs. arctic to name a few. These are the balancings with which Masters depicts in "Trampoline Games," the book's opening novella, sun-blasted male teenagerdom in the 1980s, and in "The Moth Orchid," its companion, the contemporary wintertime travails of an Alaskan researcher. Regarding the first: no supernatural sci-fi a la "Stranger Things" here, folks, just excellent, controlled writing about explosives and parental strife and throwing stars and aimlessness and lust. I, like Masters, came of age in the 80s, though on the other side of the continent, and I can tell you that "Trampoline Games" is how it was—so much so that I got the impression Masters had secretly surveilled me for years. Anyone who wants to know what boys did with their time before screens and the indoors conquered all of American life should read "Trampoline Games," and anyone who wants to know where its simmering chaos often leads should read what follows it. "The Moth Orchid," with a female instead of a male protagonist, transpires in Alaska, where Masters and I were students together at the turn of the millennium. Alaska appears here in all its extremity, drab and majestic both, and Masters presents, too, as he should, all the effects the pressures of those extremes exert on a psyche. Like the boy at the center of "Trampoline Games," the woman at the focus of "The Moth Orchid" seeks meaning in her own life. She must gaze backward through a haze of life-history and dementia while the boy squints forward into a future the scrambled context of his present cannot help him predict, but as ABOVE AN ABYSS conjoins their narratives, readers can watch as an impressive and remarkable achievement of syncretic artistry coheres before their eyes. ABOVE AN ABYSS represents Masters' first published volume of fiction. Let's hope it's the first of many. ...more

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Jan 01, 2019 Tricia Yost rated it it was amazing

The pair of stories in this book play with the themes of youth/age, innocence/experience,
male/female, sunny searing Utah/dark cold Alaska, knowledge/oblivion. Both stories are disquieting and fully satisfying in structure, tone, and voice. From page one, this book is a tight gem.

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About Ryan Masters

Ryan Masters

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Ryan Masters is a writer and poet from Santa Cruz, CA. He spent a decade on staff at the Santa Cruz Sentinel and The Monterey County Weekly. He is a frequent contributor to The Surfer's Journal and former poet-in-residence for the City of Pacific Grove, CA. His poetry and fiction work have appeared in publications such as The Iowa Review, Catamaran Literary Reader and Unlikely Stories. Above an Ab ...more