On the surface of an ancient bone-dry lake, amidst pockets of urban wilderness, on top of unmapped mountain ridges, and in cities ranging from Seattle to Istanbul the characters in these stories are always on the move but are rarely headed to where they want to be. Viv’s already tenuous grip on reality is shattered when she is forced to leave the safety of her remote desert outpost. Paula’s real life and dream life become indistinguishable when she meets Marcus while working at a local hospital. Oliver can’t seem to shed the hold of family lore and superstition as he negotiates his love affair with Daniel. Siblings, Alex and Marcie, are comforted and scraped raw by intimacy as they traverse the years from juvenile vandalism to a labor and delivery gone terribly wrong. Miles searches for his mother in a homeless encampment beneath a maze of freeways. And in the aftermath of her mother’s death, Sam finds herself miles from shore on a frozen lake with a virtual stranger. Wild places and hidden urban spaces exert a gravitational pull on the lives of the characters who populate the pages of Lake Effect. These unsettling stories question the limits of our well-intentioned efforts to care for each other in our ever more inhospitable world.