The Nameless

The Nameless

By: Chad Mooney

The Nameless is a collection of four short stories. The first story, “Object Permanence,” is about a young man and his obsession with the girl who lives down the street, and the extreme lengths he will go to to be close to her. “Somewhere Between Screaming and Crying” is about a man suffering from retrograde amnesia, and details his leaving the hospital and going home to attempt to resume his life along with his loving wife, whom he does not remember and views as a stranger. “The Thirteenth Step” is about a psychopath who picks up vulnerable young women at Narcotics Anonymous meetings. “Mors Indecepta” is a retelling of an old Somerset Maugham story (“Appointment In Samarra”), about how there’s no such thing as cheating death.

These stories explore the darker side of human nature, the narrator often appearing as the anti-hero or antagonist, and these dark themes are contrasted with the sometimes flowery and sunny prose used to describe moods and settings in the stories. It is Chad Mooney’s hope that the reader not only enjoys his prose, which is a point of pride, but perhaps sees through even the smallest of windows a quick glimpse of something dark and frightening about the nature of human beings that perhaps they may not have even considered before.