BIG OTHER

“The vanishing of the doctor’s wife’s child in broad daylight was an event so cataclysmic that it forever divided time into the then and the now, the before and the after.”
–From “The Paperhanger,” by William Gay
On this doom-laden, quasi-biblical note, William Gay begins his menacing modern fairy tale, “The Paperhanger,” introducing an omniscient voice that unravels dispassionately, in cadences reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, always withholding when a less skilled writer would divulge, refusing to explain a violent world’s caprices and keeping us at arm’s length from the titular character in a way that renders him all the more sinister and cryptic.