Review of Three Alarm Fire by Juan Carlos Reyes

Brent Ameneyro
Jul 7
4 min read

October 22, 2024

Hinton Publishing

ISBN: 978-1609441562

Three Alarm Fire is an exploration of perspective, of feeling, and of the human experience. When reading this short story collection, I sometimes feel like I’m in a chapter of Kafka’s The Trial—where seemingly normal lives unfold with an ominous undertone—and other times I’m in a Roberto Bolaño short story—where intelligent characters discuss poetry and literature. Even when not directly stated, the scenes feel very East Coast, very big city. There’s often a sense of community, empathy, responsibility, and caring built into the characters.

“Without wounded children how can the rest of us know we’ve grown up.”

There is a strong sense of place throughout the collection. In one story, there are characters referred to only by the city in which they were born. In another, neighbors hear noises from the streets, from other people in their immediate community. It’s easy to visualize dense, big city living in these stories. It’s an American short story collection through and through. The story “Drown” takes place mostly in a car, where two teenagers almost die in an accident and then face a terrifying interaction with a police officer—nothing is more American than cars and abuse of power.

The characters are expansive. From an off-screen, ominous personification of “Scared,” to a time traveling angel that’s addicted to cigarettes, these characters are in no way generic. In the story “Tomorrow Everyone Lives,” there’s a boy whose body expands and hardens, which inadvertently kills people. This comic book-like character is subject to criticism and judgmental gazes in an elevator scene, which opens up the story for interpretation. I can read this as a story about body dysmorphia, fat shaming, or generally feeling othered by not appearing in an expected way. There are also moments in this story that suggest it can be read as the story of an immigrant, where there is a constant feeling that organizations, the government, and the media are looking for reasons to villainize him. What’s great about this character—and many others in this collection—is that these deeper meanings are not blurted out. There is a graceful approach to character and story development that allows these themes to boil gently beneath the surface, empowering and trusting the reader to do their part.

“But some of us only know how to bury anxiety in a prayer. Even when we don’t believe in god.”

Reyes shows the range of his writing in this collection, using different forms, points of view, sentence length, and diction between the stories. In the story “Poetics of a Broken Conversation,” Reyes employs the elusive second person point of view to implicate the reader in a chaotic scene centered around the theme of gun violence. This technique allows Reyes to utilize the reader’s psyche to unpack the complicated issue, to show how even well-intentioned individuals can be misinterpreted and targeted when emotions are heightened.

In some instances, the protagonist is a teenager and the story is written in first person, so the language is colloquial and the sentences are punchy. In the story “In Defense of Unnameable Things” however, Reyes fills the pages with long, Virgina Woolf style sentences. The diction is more complex as the characters are more intelligent, more well-read. When comparing soccer matches to sentences, one character says, “Exhilarating long-awaited scores are nothing without the extensive void before them.” This story makes the case for rambling, for run-on sentences, and it’s done through characters that obsess over the kinds of things us writers obsess over. The actions of the characters—rummaging through a library searching for the right poem—are not noble or thrilling, but like the long, droning sentence (or the long, goalless soccer match), this story meanders, and it does so in celebration of language.

Throughout the collection there are dramatic scenes with cars and guns and police, but there are so many pages filled with the aforementioned meandering. The story “Warrior, New Jersey” is one of young love with characters learning how to be adults. The characters are named based on where they’re from. They learn to navigate subtle bullying, prejudice, and other uncomfortable social situations. The protagonist has a moment of self-awareness, one that briefly acknowledges both the fact that he’s telling the story and that the heart of the story is not marked by any significance beyond storytelling itself: “After she kissed my chin, I might have leaned into her lips, but life is sometimes just one boring confession after the next, and that might have been mine.” This is the beauty in this collection; it reminds us of the power of literature and storytelling, of turning “one boring confession after the next” into magic.

Brent Ameneyro is the author of the collection A Face Out of Clay (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2024) and the chapbook Puebla (Ghost City Press, 2023). He was the 2022–2023 Letras Latinas Poetry Coalition Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. He currently serves as an associate at Letras Latinas and as the Poetry Editor at The Los Angeles Review.