As with the high wire, these stories require close attention; they should be read slowly and carefully. They seem to have been written that way, every step deft and deliberate. Take the opening title story. Its narrator is “I,” and he’s addressing “you” about their young son. The first reference to the titular alligator is the cartoon on the young boy’s shirt. Yet the alligator will reappear in various manifestations, and so will “I.” He says he’s telling “a story forming the sum of my life,” before quickly shifting and pivoting: “No. This never happened; it’s the wrong alligator. The wrong child, the wrong life. Sometimes I lie to myself because it’s the only clarity I seem to have when confronted by some terror no method of thinking can fathom. Lying meaningfully to answer certain sublime questions. Where the meaningfully is the new truth. A story.” So, these are stories about the essence, process, and value of storytelling. But they are also about those terrors—families falling apart, identities crumbling, tornadoes and earthquakes and industrial contamination wreaking havoc. Several stories include “David,” but there’s no evidence that these are more (or less) autofictional than the others. Life can change in an instant, with cause-and-effect consequences that might reverberate for decades. Particularly virtuosic is the dream-within-dream sequence of “Reliquary,” one of many stories of a young boy left with a single parent: “That night I dream that I am my mother dreaming about my father. I’m witnessing this but I am inside the dream, too. In it, he’s died and we’re watching him on the pallet pulled from the mudslide. It’s a vague memory, really. A bright red thread weaving through space between the real moment and the dream of the moment, which is itself no less real.”