Edward Falco brings a light, skillful touch to this collection of short stories. He uses narrator like light through a prism; held this way, it's the father of a fourteen-year-old girl in "The Revenant;" a slight movement and it becomes the fifteen-year-old son of math genius who, as he puts it can, barely multiply in "The Professor's Son;" and my favorite in this collection, a father and son struggling with family issues in the title piece, "Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha."
Families and how the past affects the future is a running theme throughout this collection. Sometimes they triumph, sometimes they stumble, but always the plots twists are absorbing and ring true to life. Falco is a master of hooking the reader into the story with a tantalizing first sentence: "First, a teenage girl flashed me at a Marilyn Manson concert." "Couple of years ago, Connie came home from work to find Doug, her second husband, swaying in nine feet of water like an aquatic Frankenstein, cement-filled milk jugs tied to his ankles...". To paraphrase the old potato chip commercial, I'll bet you can't read just one. Four stars for this collection.