Wells Tower Overview

The terrifically-named Wells Tower had been writing professionally – had been published, that is – for a little under two decades before releasing his first short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.  He'd established a reputation during this period for creating nuanced and complete worlds within his short stories, worlds that, however varied, held traces of the divine and the grotesque warily at their corners, prepared to sneak in, in a mercilessly destructive cavalcade, at any moment – and yet rarely would this ever happen; instead they just wait perennially beside the action, warily preparing themselves.  His worlds are quite varied, and show signs of numerous influences throughout – the stifling suburbia of John Cheever, the enveloping rural settings of Flannery O'Connor, the magnified imaginary settings of George Saunders.  Many had wondered how, when and if his stories were collected, such tremendous variety would cohere.  With Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Tower prepares a kind of Cheever-to-Saunders progression, stopping in with O'Connor, Sam Shepherd, and  Barthelmes Donald and Frederick along the way; but it is the fragility of the lives within and their sundry efforts at dealing with and combatting this fragility, and the thoughtfulness behind the presentation of their lives, that make the collection cohere in more than just the conceptual framework of any such stylistic progression.  Tower has been proclaimed the savior and the future of the traditional short story; and yet he has made abundantly clear in his fictions that it is not tradition he is necessarily tied to – he clearly has a preference for traditional structures, but his abilities enable him to use them toward unexpected ends – but, rather, that this well-trod terrain is in need of greater exploration.  Many may believe that the traditional short story, with Chekhov as its progenitor, is well beyond its productive years, and that its capacities have long since been fully exorcised; Wells Tower begs to differ: as his work makes clear, we haven't yet dug deep enough.