Kurt Tidmore's characters can be painfully normal or they can be completely insane or bereaved or deluded, but each of them is offered to us unvarnished, seen with clarity and empathy. Like real life, they may be funny, but never only funny, or they may be grim, but never without humor, because this is what real life is like. Reading Kurt Tidmore, one is aware of the pleasure of his writing as well as the cruelty of human fate. These are sympathetic stories for an unsympathetic time.