A barista discovers that customers keep thanking him for advice he never gave. A woman who has made herself everyone’s emergency contact realizes no one is listed as hers. A regular at the local pub notices that when the wrong drink arrives and the customer drinks it anyway, someone’s life comes apart before closing time. 

In ten interconnected stories, Erin King walks the streets of one small river town and finds the same quiet catastrophe on every block: the things people swallow to avoid a scene. A drowned woman becomes a museum. A wellness influencer’s funeral fills with mourners who knew her only through their earbuds. A false obituary tells the truth about a retired school counselor before she has died. A house clearer opens a dead woman’s notebook and finds her own name inside it. And behind an old chapel, after three nights of rain, the earth begins returning what the town buried. 

Wry, unsettling, and unexpectedly tender, The Things People Call Fine moves from dark comedy to literary horror and back again, asking what it costs to keep the peace, and who ends up paying. Each story stands alone. Together, they are a portrait of a town where nobody wants to be the one to mention that something is wrong. 

For readers of Shirley Jackson, Elizabeth Strout, and Carmen Maria Machado.