Dorene O’Brien’s debut collection Voices of the Lost and Found opens powerfully with the story “Ovenbirds,” narrated by a woman haunted by a childhood abduction. Held hostage as a teenager for twenty-nine days in the Catskills, the adult narrator is still consumed by a handful of haunting phrases from that time: “He had her, and then he lost her,” “timing is everything,” and the increasingly terrifying description of the “rough-hewn cabin” where she was held. At the time of the story, it is ten years later and although the narrator has a husband and a child of her own now she still finds herself worrying her old wound and describing her current life under the terms of her near-month as a hostage. Even describing the strength of her fireman husband, she eventually leads back to her captor, as in this early paragraph:

My husband's back grows into a wall of flame at night, an impenetrable barrier, and only then do I feel safe enough to sleep. I often believe he is made of fire, having lived in it for years, having sucked its black smoke into his body and bent it to his will. Now he can tame fire, as he can tame my fears, and his back, a constellation of scars etched by falling embers, bursts into flame just for me. “ You don't want this ,” I told him when we first met, “ I'm not who you think.” But he wanted it, wanted everything, wanted to save me the way he'd saved snarling dogs and trembling women and shrieking children tossed from upstairs windows. “ Tell me,” he said, “ let me help you carry it ,” and I started, “ The rough hewn cabin, the rough hewn cabin, the rough hewn cabin...”

Although O’Brien’s narrator does not find resolution, she does find faith in the small things, “the things [she] can live in one moment or hold in the small of [her] hand.” Instead of rest she finds vigilance, and instead of lasting peace she finds the ephemeral comforts of an everyday life lived attentively.

“Ovenbirds” is an impressive story, and if no other story in Voices of the Lost and Found quite reaches that level it is only because the bar has been set so high. Other standout stories include “Crisis Line,” narrated by a call center worker who two nights a week pits his “practiced advice and little white lies against murder, mutilation, and suicide,” revealing a bragging surety that combines with his self-described tactic of “desperate flirtation” to blind him from seeing the damage he is capable of causing. Elsewhere, a grad student runs a classmate aground by encouraging his compulsive behavior in “The Stalwart Support of the Obsessed,” and in “Things That Never Come,” a husband finds the will to support his wife too late, after she has already left him for a man offering what he is only beginning to be capable of. These are the kind of characters that O’Brien concerns herself with over and over: not just the “lost and found” of the collection’s title, but also the obsessed and the haunted.

In “Riding the Hubcap,” the narrator passively goes along with his friend Mason again and again as a simple running away from home turns into a murderous interstate crime spree. Despite plenty of opportunities to stop Mason or to leave him, it isn’t until the very last possible moment that the narrator makes a move to differentiate himself from his criminal friend. Still, there is the sense that this late action is enough, that the reader is expected to believe in this demarcation of the innocent and the guilty, that even one second of change after a long period of passiveness is enough to matter. Perhaps the change matters all the more because of the resistance against it, because of the overcoming of a lifetime of emotional inertia. Perhaps this is why O’Brien’s stories grants these smallest of decisions her best reward— Not epiphany or resolution, but a sense that that this is the last time these events ever have to happen, that even if life does not get better at least it will at least be different than it was before, that at last things have really changed.

Voices of the Lost and Found is a strong debut, and at its best showcases a writer with an impressive array of talents, including a sharp eye for detail and a deft descriptiveness that never gets in the way of the main attraction, her spectacularly drawn characters. More than anything, it is the strong and unique voices of her narrators that will lure you into these stories and that you will remember long after you’ve finished reading this excellent collection.  O'Brien is a talent to keep on the lookout for, and Voice of the Lost and Found is a great place to start watching.