Distributed by YesYes Books and Ingram
Cover Art by Todd Hido
Cover & Interior Design by Olivia M. Hammerman
Author Photo: Maegan Gray
$22 | 156 pages | ISBN: 978-1-946303-05-9
Fiction l Perfectbound | May 27, 2025
Praise for The Nothing by Lauren Davis
In The Nothing, Lauren Davis channels the eerie surrealism and biting social critique of Aimee Bender and Ramona Ausubel, though these folktales are all her own. Each story fractures expectation and then gathers up what’s left, creating a bricolage of the uncanny. “Shadows cannot be caught,” Davis writes, but here she has done just that—harnessed the lingering traces of The Real and reanimated them. Morphed by nostalgia, grief, and the strangeness of desire in all its forms, Davis’s stories are tiny portals through the mundane into something fresher and truer and thus more beautiful.
—Lindsey Drager, author of The Avian Hourglass
Lauren Davis has written such unnerving stories and characters that one wants to watch them unfold even after their final turn, evoking Bergman or Lynch.
—Luke Goebel, author of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours
The stories in The Nothing harbor ghosts, mountain views, movie theatres, and haunting pastorals to create a world that is both modern and eternal as fable. Davis’s landscapes feel as fully inhabited as the magnificent, occasionally grotesque dreamscapes the narrators lead us into, the surreal grounded in the startlingly real. Rich with vivid details and the subtle intimacies of life, this book traverses slowly and bravely into the dark, flickering with flame and sifting through the ashes of grief to tell “graciously human” stories.
—Erin Slaughter, author of A Manual for How to Love Us and The Sorrow Festival
There are ghosts in these stories. Sometimes literal, other times only in metaphor or feeling, but ever present in every story in Lauren Davis’s The Nothing is something just off page, under the surface, aching and yearning and pulling and haunting every sharp, minimal, perfect sentence, not unlike the way these stories themselves will get their hooks in you and keep haunting long after you’ve put it down.
—Aaron Burch, author of Year of the Buffalo
The Nothing
The Nothing is available to PreOrder at 20% off!
"Lauren Davis’s The Nothing is a striking collection of stories that slip between the real and the surreal, pulling readers into eerie, dreamlike worlds. Set against the misty isolation of the Pacific Northwest, these stories hum with a quiet unease, exploring themes of solitude, loss, and the strange ways reality can shift when you least expect it."
-Compulsive ReaderAnd check out the interview with Lauren Davis at What We Reading: Find Your Next Great Read!
from “Tastes Like Rat”
We were two sallow sweethearts on a sea of salted sheets, floating through fever and shadows. We ate each other’s laments. A sun came up, snickering at the heat it spilled into that illicit sickroom. We could hide from nothing, especially the moon, who made us nauseous, and thirsty, and a little savage. Who stayed past its welcome. I pulled the blinds, but when I turned my back, they were peeled away again and I would clutch them together then lie on the sea exhausted and still he slept and still the sun fell about mocking and tapping at the glass. I would say we ate, but I am not convinced that’s true. If he awoke it was only to ask to be held.
About the book
The Nothing, Lauren Davis’s debut fiction collection, exists on the whisper between reality and illusion. Think Shirley Jackson's characters stuck in the damp Pacific Northwest or an Olympic Peninsula funhouse mirror held up to Karen Russell's Florida. The worlds Davis creates acknowledge the terror and seek the gifts of solitude, grief, and the unrelenting thirst for certainty within us all.
About the author
LAUREN DAVIS is the author of the short story collection The Nothing (YesYes Books, 2025) and the poetry collections Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press) and When I Drowned (Kelsay Books). Her fiction won the Landing Zone Magazine’s Flash Fiction Contest and her fiction and poetry have been finalists for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize and the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, among others. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous literary publications and anthologies including Prairie Schooner, Spillway, Poet Lore, Ibbetson Street, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere, and she has taught at The Writers’ Workshoppe, Adirondack Center for Writing, BARN Bainbridge, Writing Workshops, and Hugo House. Davis lives with her husband on the Olympic Peninsula in a Victorian seaport community.
