Ratcatching in the Ruins

“People tell me rats are as scared of us as we are of them. But I have seen them charge into the night without compunction. No discernable hesitation. As if it’s possible to know every contour of the darkness ahead.” So the narrator of Elizabeth Hall’s Season of the Rat (Cash 4 Gold Books, 2025) muses as she faces (and endeavors to know) the contours of darkness that lay ahead following a sexual assault in her recent past and a potential romance in her near future. Studded with prose as laconic as it is sun-cut clear, this horror- and noir-tinged novella of SoCal autofiction is as devastatingly witty as it is sadly devastating. Braiding genre riffage with a concentrated and caliche-hard confessional, this tiny, eighty-four-page beast is as strange and fearless as the curious rodent that soundtracks the narrator’s nights.