A Cylindrical Object on Fire in the Dark is a collection of short fiction exploring the elemental aspects of storytelling—from word to sentence to character to gesture to narrative. In the roughly two dozen works that make up the book, Myers is attentive to the operations of words: how it is that words collude into sentences, and sentences balloon into worlds. Of equal concern are the operations of people: how people use these words, whether to shape, accommodate, resist or deny the realities with which they contend; how they make sense of where they find themselves; in what erratic or desperate manner they strive; what they get right and where they go wrong. These works ask how do words, sentences and humans behave in the face of war, ghosts, extreme weather, motherhood, alien possession, insect infestations, love, grief, or violence.