Seattle author Juan Carlos Reyes explores the good, the bad, the ugly of the human experience in 'Three Alarm Fire'

January 13, 2025 / 9:01 am

caption: The KUOW Book Club is reading "Three Alarm Fire" by Juan Carlos Reyes in January 2025.

This is KUOW's book club, and we just read through the first half of Juan Carlos Reyes' fiction collection "Three Alarm Fire." I'm your club guide, Katie Campbell. Let's get into it.

eyes' collection is broken up into sections that explore what I've started thinking of as the good, the bad, and the ugly of the human experience from several perspectives. The result is a collection of stories that dissect things like love, fear — or "scared," as its called and anthropomorphized in the first story — and violence through the author's unique prose.

Some stories are more successful than others. In the section "Of Hearts and Minds," which I saw as the love section, the story called "In Defense of Unnameable Things" left me feeling more like I was missing something than I was in on something.

But with stories like "Warrior, New Jersey" — also in the love section — and "Poetics of a Broken Conversation" in the titular "Three Alarm Fire" section, Reyes should be forgiven if a reader can't quite connect to every word. Because the words I did connect with rocked me.

"Warrior" and "Poetics" highlight Reyes' ability to lift his readers up high with good vibes and to bring them crashing down into uncomfortable levels of self-awareness.

In "Warrior," two college students slowly fall in love in the midst of becoming adults — and all the tiresome responsibilities that comes with. Reyes describes this process from our narrator's perspective, in a poetic pattern, like an equation but prettier. It starts here:

She seems comfortable enough to enjoy the silence with me, and it's then, I think, that I learn how a buddy becomes a friend. THREE ALARM FIRE, PAGE 29

The pattern develops next:

It's weird the way it happens sometimes. How a friend becomes a woman. THREE ALARM FIRE, PAGE 31

And the equation reaches a logical but no less lovely satisfying solution:

She's wearing a grey skirt, tall black and beat-up boots, and a thick beige jacket with its elbows and shoulders padded. Like if a runway show suddenly dropped a gauntlet on its models, she'd be ready. She's pretty. She's always been pretty. But sometimes a friend becomes a woman when you don't know how one thing multiplies into the next. When maybe you don't even know how the next million or hundred quintillion or googol factors into the equation. Maybe I've steeped too long in linear algebra, but sometimes the feeling blooms like dust and earth kicked up after a bomb. I'm not ashamed of the feeling. I'm just surprised I feel so unprepared for it. THREE ALARM FIRE, PAGE 32

Readers, this was a Grade A love story — and I hate love stories! I don't do flowery language or "will they, won't they" plots and the like. But I loved this love story. And I think that's because he took the mundane pieces, the evolution of feelings, and let them be special. I don't need drawn out passages about how a man comes to love a woman. All I need, it turns out, is to know "a friend becomes a woman" and the magic of feeling "unprepared" for that moment.

That's humanity, plain and simple and somehow magnificent because it exists.

Reyes can take the plain and simple and also highlight how messed up it can be, too.

When I started the "Three Alarm Fire" section, I hoped it would be a real standout, making it clear why the whole book bears the same name. And it sure did just that.

This section begins with "Poetics of a Broken Conversation," rife with quiet devastation. It's a deeply unsettling story from start to finish, thanks in large part to the tension Reyes builds as the narrator processes an unnamed tragedy.

At first, Reyes leads the reader to believe this is a poignant, albeit standard, critique of how the U.S. copes — or doesn't — with tragedy.

There's a tragedy. A mass shooting, an earthquake, a mass shooting, a police betrayal, a mass shooting. As Americans, we have our inclinations. You hear the news from a friend and then you explore it, and its details pass through trains of conversation, and you're not alone. You know people touched by the thing, though you don't know them well, but that isn't the point, and you rub your eyes again as the traffic rolls by and the apartment buildings across the street linger like stones and the world just goes on. THREE ALARM FIRE, PAGE 69

The narrator's ennui continues as they — you? — make their way to their as-yet-unknown destination. But that ennui seems to be shifting into something more desperate:

Thumbs. Your kingdom — your kingdom for a pair of fast-typing thumbs. You scroll because you're sure that there's something you can post and somewhere you can post it, where you can offer real feelings that bring comfort to other people's real feelings, bring reason — real reason —to the conversation. You're pretty sure everybody needs you to post something because how else to keep them from stumbling into each other and into themselves, to keep them replacing a tragedy of dead children with a tragedy of unpasteurized ideas. Everyone needs you — you — to keep from overwhelming the dead and turning the tragedy into just another blasphemy, something that evaporates after people have proven it wrong. THREE ALARM FIRE, PAGES 70-71

That passage is gut-wrenching in its familiarity.

But a few pages later, the familiarity in this person's desperation to do something is ripped away when they reveal their destination: the home of a grieving family. Again, Reyes takes us from plain and simple to magnificent, or magnificently tense.

The narrator explains they're trying to "collaborate" with this family, which has not returned the narrator's efforts to get in touch. And now, they're at the family's house. They're live-streaming outside of the family's house. Like I said: gut-wrenching in its familiarity.

You push open the wobbly front gate. You identify the losses that all the families have faced. The daughters, sons, fathers, mothers, providers, lovers, friends, dear friends, companions. Standing on the gravel path, you confirm how families like these don't need ridicule, that trespassing into their mourning would be a disgrace, that opening their front door would be criminal, that whosoever tarnishes this family's name on social media only lays their own bodies to shame. You ask your audience if they can hear it, the sounds just inside the front door, seeping through the natural crevices in the house. You kneel by the door. You place your phone's speaker and voice receiver against the wood. THREE ALARM FIRE, PAGE 74

Chilling. And it doesn't get less chilling, as neighbors spot the narrator, interrogate them, attack them, and, ultimately, shoot them. It's a demonstration of mob mentality, but it's complicated because it's borne out of a desire to protect the grieving family. This is not a feel-good story like "Warrior, New Jersey." And it's not a standard critique.

There's nothing really standard about the collection, so far, at all.

Reyes presents us with a wide range of characters in a way that I would have believed they were written by a wide range of authors if I didn't know better. The result is engaging, and it's left me excited to keep reading — and to talk to Reyes about how it all came together.

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Spoiler alert: I have found February's pick — and it's a cookbook! We'll be reading and cooking with "Feasts of Good Fortune" by Seattleites Hsiao-Ching Chou and Meilee Chou Riddle. It came highly recommended by KUOW foodie and food reporter Ruby de Luna, and I was sold pretty quickly. The book offers 75 recipes "for a full year of celebrations with family and friends the Chinese American way in this deeply personal intergenerational cookbook, cowritten by mother and daughter." Heckin' yes!

And while you're here, a reminder: This year, I'll be announcing my picks on the first of each month. That just helps me ensure we have enough time to read and really enjoy each book equally.

As always, you can join the conversation by emailing me directly at kcampbell@kuow.org. You can also subscribed to the Book Club newsletter here.

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Katie Campbell
Online Editor/Reporter

Katie joined KUOW's online team as an editor and reporter in 2024, after serving three years as senior producer of the local Morning Edition program. In addition to reporting on the news of the day, she brings readers some levity with a weekly news quiz and curates the KUOW Book Club.
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