Undertow and Other Laments by Michael Kelly reviews

"Many of these stories take as their point
of departure the death of a child, and that’s
the case with title novella, ‘Undertow’. A
man mourns his ruined marriage and the
mess his life has become: a father grieves
for his son, lost in a drowning accident for
which he blames himself. But sometimes
the dead do come back and redemption of
a kind is possible. ‘Undertow’ is a keenly
felt tale, one in which the sorrow almost
weeps off the page, and shot through with
a terrible sense of pain and undoing, as
hints of the outré are injected into the text,
the reader never able to be sure if these
things are really happening or simply the
hallucinatory experiences of the character,
and in the end it doesn’t really matter. The
authenticity of the lived experience is all
that counts."

- Peter Tennant

Black Static Magazine