Notice of Entry

The county has to put a dollar value on a fallout shelter a man built in his own back yard in 1961. The state cost manual has no line for it. It has no above-ground living area. Its footprint is twenty-two square feet larger than the main floor of the house it was built to protect. It has no roof area to measure, and the manual's list of yard improvements runs to fourteen items and stops. So the assessor enters no value, and no value means the shelter is not on the tax roll, and the sixty percent demolition grant the family is applying for requires the structure to be on the tax roll.

Nine stories. Nine narrators, and every one of them has a lawful reason to walk into a stranger's house and write down what is inside it: a mine subsidence surveyor whose benchmark is sinking with the town, a claims adjuster holding both policies that deny the same loss, a census enumerator under a lifetime oath, a substitute trustee counting a house nobody has claimed, a water department meter technician, a licensed home inspector on a buyer's dime, a court-appointed appraiser of personal property, a county sanitarian serving a closure order on a kitchen that never held a permit.

Nobody is rescued by the agency that sent him. There is no monster in these stories. The weight is carried by a form, a rate table, a filing deadline, a signature, and a measurement taken correctly.

The paperwork here is real paperwork. The rates, the formulas, the dates and the measurements were worked out and checked against each other, 188 figures in all, before any of these stories was finished. Nine narrators, and no two of them sound alike.

Contemporary American gothic, set in county offices, basements, crawl spaces and back lots. Quiet, procedural, and cold.