Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town – Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock
Some story collections demand patience and reward it. Others demand patience and leave you wondering why you gave them the benefit of the doubt. “Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town” sits somewhere in the middle. It is well-intentioned and intermittently moving, but ultimately uneven.
Set across various states in the American West in the mid-1990s, the book follows a loosely connected cast of teens growing up in Alaska, Colorado, Washington and Wyoming. These characters — a mixture of outsiders trying to blend in and insiders trying to break out — encounter grief, jealousy, sexual abuse and fleeting moments of first love.
There’s a chain-like narrative structure here that invites comparison to Ben Shattuck’s “The History of Sound” or Elizabeth Strout’s “Olive Kitteridge,” but Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock’s execution doesn’t quite hold together. The links between stories are more interesting in theory than in practice, and only a few land with the emotional weight they seem to be aiming for.
That said, when the collection works, it works fairly well. “Sea-Shaken Houses,” “Parking-Lot Flowers” and “The Right Kind of People” are the trio of standouts – each well-paced, complex and character-driven.
The first follows Martha and Jane, possible half-sisters navigating fractured family dynamics and a haunting encounter with a boy suffering amnesia. The second gives us Ben, still sorting through the meaning of a kiss with a male classmate. And the third centers on Delia, a Wyoming girl molested by a priest who retaliates in a blaze that becomes both figurative and literal. I would’ve read a novel about these characters.
Others, like “There’s Gas in the Tank, Louise” or “Alaska Was Wasted on Us,” feel adrift by comparison. Characters blur, metaphors turn heavy-handed and repeated plot devices – missing parents, sexual trauma and restless young women – start to dull in effect. There’s ambition here, but not always the structural or stylistic control to sustain it.
Unfortunately, the audiobook didn’t help matters. Erin Tripp’s narration is flat and unemotional, and the poor production quality (missing chapter breaks, jumbled transitions) made an already-fragmented book harder to follow. It’s a shame, because the material could have benefited from a more dynamic reader and tighter editing.
In the end, “Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town” is a missed opportunity. It gestures toward interconnected trauma and small-town claustrophobia but only occasionally brings those themes to life with the clarity and resonance they deserve.
You might find moments to love here, but you’ll have to sift through a fair amount of narrative bloat to get to them.
Rating (story): 3/5 stars
Rating (narration): 2/5 stars
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Dates read: May 13 – May 14, 2025
Multi-tasking: Not recommended. Between the subpar narration, poor production and mess of characters, it is easy to get lost in the details and then miss the connections that actually make this interesting.
