Eric Cyr’s debut collection of short stories, Here It Snows in June, provides portraits of struggling men resembling those who have populated recent headlines; they muddle through, seeking connection, confidence and clarity. But instead of depicting them dissecting data or analyzing their problems, Cyr shows his characters’ pain and uncertainty as he takes us inside their intimate daily lives. (Full disclosure: I attended the same M.F.A. program as the author.)
The collection’s title is a reference to the wild weather patterns of the American Midwest (specifically Minnesota, where most of the stories take place), but it also serves as a metaphor for the characters’ collective pessimism. Many of them find life to be disappointing—a grievance, an annoyance, a frustration. As they face failing marriages, hunting accidents, loneliness, difficult fathers, school bullies and unrequited love, it is easy to imagine them thinking, Can you believe this?
This is not a question of incredulous awe, but of utter dismay. Life has not panned out as they planned, much like a June day ruined by unseasonable snow.
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that a major theme throughout the collection is the certainty and reality of death. The very first story is narrated by a young boy with a serious medical condition, introducing death’s presence immediately. The story’s final lines present us with a literal memento mori, as the narrator holds a deer skull and places “his fingers in the two hollow sockets and imagine[s] those empty spaces refilled.”
This image—and the narrator’s attitude—set the tone for Cyr’s male characters. He exposes the “empty spaces” that each of them experiences acutely—the places where they sense death, whether in the challenges of old age, or in relationships, or vocations, or in a brutal and unexpected attack (which I won’t spoil)—and holds them up for readers to examine. Ultimately, though, the characters face death as a mirror and a reminder of those “empty spaces” longing to be filled. The stories prod us to think: How have we filled our own lives? When death comes, what will it show about how we have lived?
In the story “Stealthy as the Night,” for example, a curmudgeonly middle-aged man named Bob picks a passive-aggressive (and at times simply aggressive) fight with his next-door neighbor, whose trees encroach onto Bob’s yard. Bob’s anger is an external manifestation of the war going on inside him, as he struggles with a strained relationship with his son and the fact that they might not reconcile before Bob’s own demise. The story concludes with Bob meditating on a “single worm, writhing as if under some great, invisible pain.”
Bob and many of Cyr’s characters (and perhaps his readers as well) could be described the same way—writhing and going through life with invisible pain. The mirror of death, then, shows Bob to be like this worm.
My favorite stories in Here It Snows in June are those about a character named Kyle. There are four stories in the collection that focus on this same character at various ages and stages of life. We read about Kyle in “The Key,” “Sacrifice Hit,” “Castor and Pollux” and the titular story. Cyr seems to know this character best; Kyle has the potential to be a semi-autobiographical representation of the author himself.
Kyle’s story is told out of order, depicting scenes from his life as a teenager, as a seminarian and then as a settled adult. He exemplifies the struggles of the other men in Cyr’s stories as he deals with desire, dejection, despair and discernment. He tries to nurture a faith that is more than words, as psalms and words from the Mass come back to him at specific moments and he hopes that they mean something deeper. Death shows up for Kyle, too, through loss and through his own close calls. For Kyle, these episodes often reveal his physical and spiritual weakness—and his need for God.
Another favorite of mine is the final story of the collection, “Bell Lap,” which is also about death. In the running world—Cyr and I are both long-distance runners—the “bell lap” refers to the last lap a runner makes around the track in a race. This story features both a high school student, Daniel, and an elderly man whose lives (and literal running and walking paths) coincide.
Cyr brings together the same themes that appear in the first story in the collection, where a young boy longs for the empty spaces in a skull to be refilled. However, in “Bell Lap” these themes deepen and take on more significant meaning for Daniel and the elderly neighbor, who is clearly making his own “bell lap” in life. Instead of stopping at the longing for something to fill the holes of death and loss, though, “Bell Lap” offers the solution: love, in all its messiness and pain and human frailty. The elderly man’s wife embodies this, and the young teenager Daniel learns it through witnessing her ordinary love for her husband, shown in her desperate attempts to find him after he has gotten lost.
Another story, “Primogeniture,” begins with an epigraph from St. Augustine’s Confessions:
If all these things tug at our will with equal force, and all together at the same time, will not these divergent inclinations put a great strain on the human heart, as we deliberate which to select? All are good, but they compete among themselves until one is chosen, to which the will, hitherto distracted between many options, may move as a united whole.
The quotation articulates the state of many of Cyr’s stories and their characters, as well as their real-life counterparts. The “paradox of choice” faces us all; until we set out resolutely to follow one way, we are spun around in chaos, in all directions, undecided and unanchored. Crises of identity, like those the news headlines point to, stem from this paradox. Should I get married? What should I study in college? What if I want something different for my life than what my parents expect? Where should I live? What should I do with my life? What is my purpose?
These questions plague Cyr’s characters just as they plague modern life. Part of what is challenging in 2026 is that there are so many options, and so one becomes paralyzed and stays stuck.
Like a good Midwesterner, Cyr’s storytelling is understated, never in the reader’s face. He lets the stories speak for themselves in their quiet, everyday way. The characters are familiar—either ourselves or people we know—and their struggles are like our own.
Cyr’s collection diagnoses much of what is wrong with American male culture. With this examination, he shows what is missing and also what might help to refill those empty spaces.
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