The Westmarch Review by Prakhar Gautam

Callahan's Place looks, from the outside, like any other neighborhood bar: a regular crowd, a bartender who remembers your order, a fireplace nobody quite explains. What it actually is, once you've been coming long enough, is a support group with a liquor license, where the house rule is that anyone can stand up, tell the truth about the worst thing currently happening to them, and expect the room to actually help.

There isn't a conventional plot holding these linked stories together so much as a place and a promise: whatever walks in the door, human, alien, temporally displaced, or quietly immortal, gets treated first as a person with a problem and only second as a premise. A story can pivot from a groan-worthy pun contest to a genuinely moving account of grief inside two pages.

The puns deserve their own paragraph, because they are, by design, terrible — Punday Night is a recurring institution, and a bad enough pun earns you the right to hurl your glass into the fireplace to a round of groans and applause. The community survives by turning pain into something you're allowed to laugh at together, badly, on purpose, in public.

This is a book about a found family disguised as a book about a bar disguised as a collection of shaggy-dog stories, and all three descriptions are simultaneously true.