Descending Fire & Other Stories

The author describes his characters as people who, though they earn little money, are not quite working poor—nor can they work without working hard. They do not know quite how to betray or abandon each other.  Mostly, they try to love anddo not readily shy from duty. Though Allman’s narratives run from starknaturalism to the near magical and the out-and-out futuristic, his imagination holds to the everyday—as if to say to his readers: Yes, lifeis grim, but it is precisely the unbearable that becomes the ground forhealing.