oe LoCascio’s Night of the Barracudas is a shape-shifting triptych, part domestic noir, part street-corner confession, part fever dream, tuned to the keys of jealousy, performance, and torment. The collection’s three sections (“The Sudden Geometry,” “Strange Days,” and “Dream Deviations”) don’t just organize stories; they change the way we hear them. Again and again, music, ritual, and deception become the meters by which people measure meaning, and how they go wrong.
“The Sudden Geometry” opens with clean lines and sharp angles. In “Where Love Has Gone,” a scotch glass, a Berg violin concerto, and a butcher’s knife triangulate the distance between marital memory and threat; LoCascio lets dread bloom in the mundane, never raising his voice. “Out Take” is its tonal counterweight: a flinty, affectionate portrait of an aging jazz firebrand who’d rather let dissonance do his talking. The section’s most chilling entries, “The Distance” and “The Haunting of Tom Wilder,” map professionalism to predation, snipers executing a job with icy aplomb; a music instructor siphoned by visitations that sharpen his ear while unstringing his body. “Geraghty House” extends that haunt into folklore: an elemental in the woods, a false wall in a cellar, a bone tool that seems to remember what it did. Even when the supernatural surfaces, the sentences stay grounded; the terror is how rationally it all proceeds.
“Strange Days” slides into the present tense of hangover America: late-night bars, frayed marriages, bad chemicals, and worse decisions. LoCascio is excellent at men who perform being men and then flinch at the bill. “Beneath a Filament Moon” compresses a marriage crisis into the click of a misfired pistol and the “beautiful silence” that follows, an earned, uneasy grace note. “Lost Call” is a small marvel of misdirection: a cocky businessman, a weary pianist, a story inside a story that yanks power away from money and hands it to craft. The title story detonates a coming-of-age fantasy; Robbie’s spring-break odyssey through a grim brothel and a vandalized cul-de-sac peels the polish off bravado until all that’s left is corrosive emptiness. And in “Dictates of the Code,” the eulogy for cousin Vito doubles as a critique of contemporary conformity; LoCascio honors an unfashionable ethic without romanticizing its violence.
“Dream Deviations” plays with genre and myth. “Misterioso” imagines the cult of the vanished jazz genius with a wink and a chill: the legend alive in plain sight, refusing canon in favor of innocence and the occasional anonymous club date. “Dog Logic,” brief and brutal, is an existential loop, a child’s cycle of desire, rationalization, and erasure that reads like a parable for adult ethics. “Noir” leans into caper and pastiche, Big Hell, a stained-glass MacGuffin, a lethal siren named Mona, a detective who drinks and endures, yet the joke never turns cheap. The choreography is brisk, the payoffs earned, and the aftertaste surprisingly moral.
What binds these worlds is LoCascio’s ear. Whether he’s staging a therapist’s intake, a barroom bluff, or a sniper’s post-game, his dialogue has tempo and torque. He writes musicians the way musicians listen: for attack, sustain, and decay. The recurring musical touchstones, Berg’s concerto, Beethoven’s Opus 111, Billie Holiday, phantom club sets, aren’t ornament. They are arguments about discipline, freedom, and the costs of both. Performance, in these stories, is never just art, it’s assassination, adultery, spiritual warfare, self-invention.
If there’s a seam, it’s that a couple of conceits (the moral fable of “Dog Logic,” the maximalist hijinks of “Noir”) threaten to turn schematic. But even then, the craft holds. LoCascio’s prose stays taut, observant, and unafraid of tenderness. He understands the power of an unsaid word, the menace of a held breath, the relief of a joke delivered half a beat late.
Night of the Barracudas is wide in its reach yet holds together as one piece, made of haunted houses and haunted bodies, codes of honor and codes of silence, the long echo after the last note dies. Whether your come for the crimes and specters, or hang out for the moral acoustics, this is a stylish, unsettling, and compassionate collection that is a great for readers who like life’s grittiness with shivers, noir with grins, and music with blood on the keys.
