Thanks to Nina MacLaughlin at the Boston Globe for kind words about the stories in Beach Town by David Daniel.
South Shore author focuses on the drama of small-town events in new short story collection
“Time, if fate allows, lets us become poets of the doomed action, the unrequited love, the hard struggle — and find humor in the human,” writes David Daniel in his new collection of short stories, “Beach Town,” out this month from the Amesbury-based Loom Press, and such is exactly what fate has allowed him. Daniel, who grew up on the South Shore, sets many of these stories in a fictional South Shore town called Weybridge, and focuses on small-town events — the opening of a new car wash, the arrival of a stranger in a leopard-print bikini, a skateboarder busting his two front teeth, borrowing an Oldsmobile, the “night air cool and secret in the low spots, salt-scented, and I’d let out the words.” The stories have the feel of reveries, remembrances, rich with nostalgia for the scent of the sea on a summer wind. “The only thing on fire these days, she thinks, is time, blazing away all around her.” The regular moments of the regular days turn out to be the most beautiful, meaningful, and humorous — haunting and human.