Ryan Shek
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:46:01 PDT

There are No Hurricanes in Michigan is a short story collection of rural noir predominantly set in Southwest Michigan, a region of both beauty and blight. These stories inhabit many places: trailers nestled in the forests of Allegan County, blueberry farms adorning the shores of Lake Michigan, decrepit barns, ornate courtrooms and the historic districts of Kalamazoo. The contrasts of these natural settings are captured in the collection's fictional characters. Rough-neck romantics, doped-up lawyers, principled abusers, repentant veterans, and hopeless farmers all navigate their own stories of violence, death and ruin. In doing so, each character exposes, or enacts, a combination of social issues unique to rural America. These issues include drug and alcohol abuse, agricultural exigency, domestic violence, sexual assault, violent crime, suicide, isolation, low educational attainment, poverty and unemployment. To lay these issues bare, while also underscoring their characters' redeeming integrities, each story largely relies on juxtaposition, symbolism, and personification for rhetorical effect.