So at first, this collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates wasn’t really moving me, and I felt that I could take them or leave them.

At least, until I read “The Disappearing,” and there were little tugs here and there in “Things Passed on the Way to Oblivion” and especially “Forked River Roadside Shrine, South Jersey.”

That last one slammed into me like the force of the accident detailed within. But it wasn’t just the event of the foolish teenager dying young, though Oates does breathe life back into the quasi-commonplace trope of tragedy.

Which I realize sounds insensitive, but when you’re inundated with tragedy, when catastrophes are broadcasted and trumpeted to the public, it gets harder to be sympathetic for what seems to the casual observer to be a rather simple death. Some high kid crashes into a tree—unfortunate, but these things happen. Even easier to rationalize when it isn’t you, or your kid or your friend.

Oates delicately constructs this story told by the perspective of what is essentially the ghost of the kid who died, and instead of bludgeoning readers with worn-out depictions of tragedy, she quietly shows us how it is tragic.

The kid’s ghost (in an unmistakably teenage-like voice) haunts the shrine that people have constructed to commemorate him and surveys those who come to visit. There is his girlfriend, there are other kids from school whose faces he remembers but not names and there is pointedly not his father.

The ghost also surveys his life, saying of it that it was a “crappy-kid’s life…mostly a shitty life wasn’t it, OK but I miss it,” a rather simple comment at face value but one that particularly hit home for me.

Because even when a life might be perceived to be mostly shitty, most people wouldn’t want to give it up. There’s still something to be valued, even in tiny, dark and insignificant lives.

Another striking element of this story is the lack of judgment found in it. It is as if Oates simply brings this story to us and gently leaves it in our minds without comment. There is no disdain for the people whose names the dead teenager doesn’t recall, who theoretically have no right to visit his shrine, who seem to be there for social reasons, nor the kid himself for being high and speeding.

There is a sense of forgiveness for all featured in the story, an admission of just plain fallible humanity.

It is a quiet little story, but as with many of the others featured within this volume, it winnows its way under the daily defenses you may not realize you have up, and it (for me anyway) makes a significant impact.