The quiet hours, made strange

A few words about the writer

Matthew Enders writes slow, atmospheric fiction about ordinary people standing on the lip of a turn — the morning after, the empty highway, the room that smells of someone who isn't there anymore. His work sits at the seam between literary fiction and quiet fantasy, and he is much more interested in what people almost say than in what they finally do.

His debut novella, Burnt Toast Theory, follows an aging poet on the morning he means to finally let his book go. His next project, The Vanishing Point Motel, is the first book of an ongoing cozy-fantasy series set in the desert outside Phoenix in 1983 — a small motel, the wrong kind of guests, and the woman who didn't know, until age fifty-three, that the work she'd been doing all her life had a second meaning.

He believes in long sentences, late bloom, and the inconveniences that take you somewhere beautiful.