Reviewed by Alexis David
Alligator
by David Ryan
New York: Cash 4 Gold Books
November 2025, 272 pages, US$16.95, ISBN: 9798990727502
“The uncanny is about as important as anything in my work. That may be that strange feeling you get—the ever-present sense of unheimlich.”-David Ryan
Alligator is a book of twenty-three stories which circle around a strange feeling of unease. Much like the experience of swimming in a pond and knowing there are dangerous, dark creatures under the surface, reading David Ryan’s work feels a little eerie, a little uncomfortable: something bad might happen at any time. This book is full of deliciously suspenseful stories, but the one that most resonated with me is “Exposure.”
In “Exposure,” a woman, Yvette, works at a plant, named “Mother.” The plant is dangerous. Ryan points at this danger, “Sometimes, when Yvette came home from a shift, her breath smelled like metal” (183). The plant is closed down, and Yvette gets another job at a photo lab. Here, she meets Michael, a wedding photographer, and marries him. But, soon after they marry, she gets cancer (presumably from the chemicals at the plant) and has to have chemotherapy. Michael takes care of her while she is sick; he also takes photos of her on his Deardorff camera.
Yvette imagines herself, “as she appeared on the back etched glass in Michael’s old camera–hovering reversed and upside down. Six feet above” (186). This detail points our paratext into predicting Yvette’s death. She imagines herself as an angel, six feet above her (the same depth as graves).
However, one night, Michael is driving home from a wedding and drives over something: “a solid cracking thump–big, but soft and hard at once” (187). He looks under the car, on the road and finds nothing. We don’t know what it is; we never know what it is. But after this happens, Michael develops the negative from the Deardorff, only to find the photos of Yvette reveal a strange shape, “It stood there in the developed image. Beside the bed, hovering over Yvette” (189); “Like the shape of a stranger” (189). Michael doesn’t know what to do and wonders if it’s something to do with a light leak in the 1800s camera.
At this point in the story, the point of view (or focalization) changes to Yvette. She hears a whispering. It can’t be explained, but she closes her eyes and begins thinking of both the way clouds obscure the sun (a narrative element that points to light) and how the worst part of death is “losing all your memories” (190).
Here, the point of view changes back to Michael who finds that the strange light, inexplicably, has returned. Yvette gets sicker, just as the darkness in the home is increasing, “So dark, even when she turned on all the lights in the house, she sometimes couldn’t stop imagining that she was no longer there. That she was a spirit now” (191).
Michael shoots another wedding and Yvette falls asleep, dreaming of the factory. This is a narrative element that points to death: she is walking through her memories and feels she needs to tell Michael some kind of news (presumably the news of her own death).
Michael comes home to find Yvette in bed, breathing and we get another narrative element here, a circular reminder of her metal breath in the beginning, “The room smelled like metal” (195). Michael sees light coming in from a street lamp outside; it is in the shape of “a crescent, a wiry hook” (196) and it begins to tremble; the whole room shakes, like an earthquake or possibly the entrance of death. He pulls the curtains and the shape disappears. The story ends.
In Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay, “The ‘Uncanny’” he defines the uncanny as “all that is terrible–to all that arouses dread and creeping horror.” It is different from something being simply “fearful” in that it “leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” “Unheimlich” is simply the German translation of “uncanny.” Heimlich means “belonging to the home.” Unheimlich isn’t the opposite of familiarity; it is housed in the same cognitive domain as “home.” The uncanny is “that in which one does not know where one is” (2). It’s a feeling of being disoriented. In Ryan’s stories, we are in familiar home settings and we are terrified. For example, in “Exposure,” the two characters are in their home. They take a photo and an unknown shape appears. This is the uncanny. There is a monster inside the home.
What interests me about Ryan’s work is that the uncanny is used to create suspense. We don’t know what that spirit in the photo is. We don’t know what Michael ran over. But, there is this strange alignment of narrative objects that make us hypothesize: is this the moment when the wife dies? Did the husband run over her soul? Is her spirit, leaving her body, being captured in the photo? The title, “Exposure” evokes both the exposure of the film and also Yvette’s exposure to the dangerous chemicals. The name of the plant, “Mother” reinforces the domestic–a feeling of the “bad mother” (the factory makes her sick) and also the fact that Yvette will never be a mother.
Ryan explained his process of writing short stories:“I’ll just write out a basic memory. It might only be a sentence or two, and then I’ll let that go somewhere. I’ll just follow it fictionally. If some other ‘true’ thing enters, I let that happen.” He explains:
These are as autobiographical as a story could be. I just dress them up and unplug certain ‘slots’ of meaning with substitute displacements. The way a dream might take an anxiety we have and dress it up differently—suddenly, the person in the dream who’s projecting certain feelings that are our own is some stranger. Take Exposure as an example. I used to do a lot of large format photography. But also, my own history of illness might track with the wife’s in that story’s case. A lot of times I won’t know how these parts of me (or of people I care about) will recombine into a story. But it’s like that—memory and experience are atomized and I just pick and choose what parts of a memory remain factual, and what parts are removed and changed to serve the story. Often most of the story will be completely unrelated to any direct situation in my life, and yet it feels directly autobiographical in every way.
While I was reading Ryan’s stories, I often felt, upon finishing them, a strange rush of emotions: tears or a release of sadness. I asked Ryan about this and he said that “Exposure” is an experiment in how to create “symmetry and balance” from the chaos of our lives. Ryan said, “People are drawn to stories . . .because if the story is well written, the reader knows that it’s gonna do something beautiful with what is in real life terrible.”
Alligator is a collection of short stories that are alive and dynamic. The unheimlich moves the reader through fictional landscapes and through something inside our unconscious minds: some deep need to read about other people’s lives and, because we are empathetic to these characters, experience a lovely catharsis. Our unconscious is a reserve of repressed emotions yearning to push at our consciousness. Ryan’s work is good, really good, because it feeds us. It allows us to nourish that part of us that needs symmetry and balance, the part of us that yearns for order in an often uncanny world.
About the reviewer: Alexis David is an American book critic, poet and fiction writer who holds an MFA from New England College. She has published reviews in Poetry International, Tupelo Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, North of Oxford, Compulsive Reader, The Masters Review and others. Her most recent review appeared in Rain Taxi. Links to her other published work can be found here: https://alexisldavid.wixsite.com/alexis/reviews.