By Eliot Granger
The instant the body leaves the known—drops from soil into sea, from bed into dream, from sense into absence—it must renegotiate every force around it. Marlene Vex’s arresting collection A Season for the Ashes wrestles with that exact moment: what happens when the ground beneath us no longer offers weight or shape. Comprising sixteen stories that span over two decades of work, the collection charts the disintegration and reconstruction of meaning in the wake of loss, liminality, and collapse.
Vex’s earlier novel, A Hollowed Grace, explored faith and failure through a fragmented tale of a deconsecrated monastery, but A Season for the Ashes cuts deeper and wider, excavating a stylistic territory somewhere between the mythic and the forensic. The stories drift across desolate plains, abandoned towns, long-haunted homes, and the bone-littered beds of ancient rivers. And yet, they don’t simply dwell in ruin—they trace, with brutal lyricism, the delicate and private ways people attempt to endure it.
The opener, “Prospero’s Weather,” is a revelation: a woman and her estranged son are trapped in an airport hotel as storms cancel flights and old wounds reopen. Vex leans into the atmospheric with precise, fevered language:
“We slept with the curtain cracked, watching the red eye lights drift like distant animals. His breath fogged the window. I wrote my name in the condensation and watched it vanish.”
What feels like a story about logistics—the endless boredom of travel—twists into a meditation on grief and the need for control in the face of death. The mother, once a hydrologist, cannot resist mapping emotional pain in terms of water tables, pressure gradients, disappearing coastlines. The story ripples with metaphor but never sinks into abstraction.
Throughout the collection, Vex often speaks through the elemental. In “Thresh,” a widow rebuilds her collapsed porch while recalling her husband’s stroke in the middle of a drought. The porch’s reconstruction is rendered with such granular attention—types of wood, humidity in the grain, the pressure-treated feel of screws in pine—that it becomes a liturgy. Her grief is not spoken, but nailed, sanded, and stained.
“Everything needs to be sealed,” she says, “or the weather finds a way in.”
Other stories edge into more experimental terrain. “Pith” unfolds entirely in fragments from a scavenged journal, telling the story of a woman stranded on an island shaped like a molar. “Remora,” a nine-page interior monologue from the perspective of a diver hooked on decompression sickness, plays like a fugue state, echoing rhythms from Samuel Beckett and Renee Gladman. Vex never lingers long in one voice or setting, but the central preoccupations—displacement, hunger, fracture—remain consistent.
Comparisons to writers like Lucy Corin or Mary Caponegro are inevitable, especially in Vex’s ability to fuse lyrical beauty with structural daring. But the heart of A Season for the Ashes lies in its insistence that damage is not only inevitable, it is architectural. “We don’t live among ruins,” a character says in “Chalkline,” “we build them.”
And yet, for all its cerebral layering, Vex’s work pulses with heat. “Harvesting Soot,” one of the most moving stories in the book, follows a disillusioned archivist who becomes obsessed with cataloguing the contents of firebombed libraries. Her lists—brittle pages, warped bindings, charred microfilm—become love letters to what can’t be saved.
The final story, “In the Nesting Season,” brings us to a crumbling coastal town where teenage girls enact rituals involving sea salt, driftwood, and dead gulls in a bizarre attempt to lure their mothers back. “We gathered what the tide coughed up,” the narrator explains, “offering it to the air as if we still knew what gods were.”
It’s here that Vex’s themes crystallize: ritual as a language for absence, the body as an unreliable compass, the mythic and mundane bound together in the same crumbling sanctuary. The story ends, not with catharsis, but with a gesture—one girl pushing her hand into wet sand, waiting for something to respond.
There are flaws, of course. A few pieces—like “Black Vine” and “The Snagged Wire”—collapse under their own density, prioritizing sound and symbol over story. But these missteps are few, and even in their obscurity, they carry a strange allure, like fractured mirrors reflecting a face you almost remember.
Marlene Vex may be a new name to some, but her work hums with a timeless ache. A Season for the Ashes doesn’t simply invite rereading—it demands it. This is not a book to be consumed. It is a book to be weathered.Author Bio
Eliot Granger writes about literature, memory, and marginal spaces. His essays and criticism have appeared in Waxwing, Shoreline Review, and The Evergrey Ledger. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is currently at work on a collection of essays about forgotten cemeteries and half-finished novels.
