Lacuesta’s language is metronomic in the precision of his beats while his stories run in free time, without completely revealing their destination. He thrives in the unconnected and the undone—in any one story two or more plotlines can coexist; characters and their histories remain disjointed and unconnected except in the minds of his protagonists and anti-heroes. We’re never let into the story; instead we’re allowed into a psyche that’s almost always half-Prufrock and half-Rick Deckard—someone hurtling toward oblivion, or someone who has narrowly escaped it.

In the title story, discontinued love makes deft and swift appearances in a plot involving an app that systematically kills off its inventors and users, setting the apocalyptic tone for the rest of the book. These are cold-blooded stories, which means that the tender paragraph or two thrown in the mix are rendered luminous.

The widely-acclaimed author’s fourth collection of fiction gathers stories that take place in the clouded past, the urgent present, and the dark future—yet all seem to happen in the same timeframe and state of mind.