Where Alligators Sleep, by Sheldon Lee Compton. Foxhead Books. 160 pages. $18.00, paper.

I love flash fiction. I love reading it, writing it, teaching it, sharing it. In a world where our attention spans are shrinking and our desire for something new is ever-expanding, flash fiction is a powerful way to satiate and surprise, to deliver the jolt of a story straight to the vein. I thought I knew flash. I felt pretty comfortable with its range and scope, its genre boundaries and limitations. And then I read Sheldon Lee Compton’s Where Alligators Sleep. And everything I thought I knew and loved about flash fiction went sailing out the front door, hit the curb and was run over by a pickup truck.

Compton’s collection of sixty-six flash stories, some a few pages in length, some as short as a paragraph, is visceral. The pieces are risky, in some cases…