In Maudlin House, a very stressful short story by J. M. Lyons titled Modern Weapons. One sentence in and I was hooked:

Since the divorce, my daughter and I use the oak tree in the backyard of my rental house as target practice.

That sentence has a hundred pages worth of world-building in it, it’s menacing and fraught.

The tension builds throughout — the narrator that Lyons has created is an unlikeable, unstable, and frightening human being:

It’s been three months since my wife of eighteen years, Sarah’s mom, Ellen, left me. Ellen got mostly everything good in the divorce: the house and primary custody of Sarah. I moved out to a squat, rambler style rental in a neighborhood bordered by chain link fences and the highway. I started drinking again. I unpacked my knives and did divorced things like hunt the committee of raccoons digging through everyone’s trash and threaten my pickleball opponents until they let me win. 

Over the course of the story the tension builds to an almost unbearable point — the last paragraph is unforgettable, but you’ll have to read it.

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