self-published, 132 pages, trade paperback, $10.00

I Will Name Them Such as Enemies!, a collection of short stories by Ryan Brosmer, has both threads of paralleling personality tones and nuances of oppositional moral mirrors, written in raw and honest words of experience that few would venture to utter. Even fewer would manage to describe these events with the simple, child-like honesty of a jaded adult, with the rhythm and flow of a haiku and the word economy of a true journalist.

Brosmer, skilled in his craft, deconstructs the basic short story form and then rebuilds it. Readers are brought to the center of each character’s obstacles, to a psychological fork in the road. Then Brosmer quietly leads the reader down both roads with each side of logic waving to the other, into a world of eavesdropping on the thoughts of people, conversations and quandaries into the nexus of the psychological reasoning that is both the sane and the insane clapping each other to make one sound.

Beginning with a drug-addled memorial gone bad, then a father who suggests through a gift to his optimist son the only way out of marriage is suicide, each story is sketched simply fluid in syllables and stark in words. My favorite story, “Science!”, is told in a “sympathy for the devil” point of view, an omniscient dimensional being observing their contribution to the human race’s real and imagined progress.

This 132-page collection of shorts is an easy read, with stories ranging from 800 words to the 3,600. Regardless of length, the way Brosmer tells a story is with clarity and invokes a subtle but permanent change in the readers’ thought process.