The Younger and Other Stories

The stories in Daniel J. O'Malley's The Younger are transmissions from another place. A haunting debut from an accomplished new voice.

A boy shows up on a couple’s porch one day and gently works his way into their life. Two friends find a knife in a field and find themselves caught up in a frightening game. On a family vacation, a woman serves her granddaughters berries that might or might not be poisonous. A widower haunted by an iguana relives the horrors of his past. A mother wonders what to do when her son brings home a bone he found in the woods, then more bones, and more…

By turns tender and unsettling, The Younger gives portraits of characters in isolation, wandering the woods and highways looking for people they might call family, places they might call home. In prose elemental and precise, O’Malley unravels mysteries that lurk just out of view, hoping to make sense of loneliness and grief, the mundane and the impossible. O’Malley navigates the spaces in between and shows us a world just uncanny enough to be our own.

Praise for The Younger

“Childhood has never been so perilous. Delightfully twisted.” —Joy Williams

“Daniel J. O’Malley’s The Younger is an electric jolt to the heart—a deliciously wild, lucid song to keep us going. It’s also a profound and clear testament to the mysteries and beauty that we encounter every day and shouldn’t ever let go of. I love how this book reminds me of the best of Denis Johnson, Ann Beattie, and Haruki Murakami. But I love more that O’Malley has carved his own bright, broken and broken-hearted world, reminding us, through the magic of storytelling, that, in all that we are afraid of, and mourn for, there is hope, real hope, for us yet.” —Paul Yoon, author of Etna

“Haunting and mysterious.” —Andrew Holgate

“From the first page of the first story in this collection, I felt like I was holding lightning. These tales unsettled me, left me feeling uneasy—they’re full of strange turns but always full of deeply human ambition. O’Malley’s work lands somewhere between Brian Evenson and George Saunders, but remains very much its own thing. This is the beginning of a marvelous career, I'm sure of it.” —Drew Broussard, Rough Draft Bar & Books, Kingston, NY

“This collection examines the very humanness of being human and our desire to find our place and people. I consumed every word of these stories and wish I could experience them again for the first time. An amazing debut from a rising talent.” —Erin Chervenock, Village Books and Paper Dreams, Bellingham, WA

“Get lost and found in this world of short stories. The people here are often lonely but they may find a little strangeness helps. O’Malley will leave you curious, touched and more.” —Revati Kilaparti, Old Firehouse Books, Fort Collins, CO

“These stories ache to be devoured down to their marrow, a raw tension hovering over every line, each sentence already sucked clean as a bone. The simplicity of each story’s opening and their easy, tight language are the perfect oppositional force to the utter strangeness, discomfort, or maybe even eerily fantastical aura that surrounds the entire collection. Even when you know a turn is coming, a moment where all is not exactly as it seems, the story’s heart is surprising, the center of it bleeding into the rest and demanding the reader rethink everything they thought they knew.” —Miranda Sanchez, Epilogue: Books, Chocolate, Brews, Chapel Hill, NC