Ghosts of a Better Life

The world depicted in Patrick Strickland’s debut story collection, A History of Heartache, is thick with undercurrents of personal violence, addiction, cynicism, and economic instability. Jobs are scarce and menial. Drugs are abundant. Parents slosh their wine and whiskey. Kids get high and play too rough.

Through his vivid, voice-driven prose, Strickland mingles societal crises and systemic obstacles with his characters’ attempts at personal survival or redemption. Strickland’s stories persistently braid these elements together as they work to generate the stories’ thematic power.

A seasoned reporter and editor from Texas, Strickland currently works as the managing editor of Inkstick Media. Though A History of Heartache marks Strickland’s fiction debut, he is also the author of three nonfiction works, including 2025’s You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave: Refugees, Fascism, and Bloodshed in Greece.

Heartache’s stories bear the mark of a journalist’s eye for detail and offer a sense of immersion into multilayered cultural dilemmas, but they always unfold like fiction rather than reportage. One story’s narrator, whose previous life has collapsed and left him clinging to the edges of employment and personal safety, frames his dilemma this way: “I know how I got here, but I just can’t figure out why I had to be the one who got here.”

By foregrounding character, Strickland ensures that these broader subjects come to us in ways that are highly personalized and lived-in. His people must navigate systemic minefields on their way to relief from pain or poverty.

The book’s title story, among several others, portrays the small details of addiction, as well as the larger toll it takes on whole families and rural communities. The complex dynamics of male friendship enrich stories like “Magic,” which contrasts two young boys who have experienced different levels of economic and familial stability. “Rooster” deepens this subject, incorporating experiences of intergenerational trauma and the signs of mental illness.  

A constant sense of escalating tension permeates Heartache. These characters are all facing multiple pressurizing obstacles simultaneously. The pressures leak out in various forms, providing us with disarming character detail.

For example, in “That Fire’s the Whole World,” an odd figure named Coach Tarp (“our youth minister, or at least that’s what he calls himself”) always paces back and forth in front of a schoolkids’ prayer group, agitated, each time he’s about to deliver his sermon. The story’s narrator tells us that Tarp’s message darkened after his wife suddenly died: “He’d been all love the sinner not the sin, but now you get the feeling he can’t wait for a blaze to eat away whatever’s left of the world. Maybe he just wants to be with his dead wife. Maybe he just wants us to be dead.”

Another widower, the narrator of “Mockingbirds,” describes how his late wife’s ghostly presence adds to the burdens he finds himself under in his daily life: “She used to be real sweet, but ever since she passed, all we do is argue. She flits around me and puts me down. A real piece of work.”

But the story isn’t cruel toward its character’s grief. Rather, it respects the nuance and paradox of his experience. The narrator goes on: “I tell her I love her. I try to remind her of how happy we were together. She won’t hear any of it, but I keep at it, trying to win her back.”

No matter their particular circumstances, the characters of Strickland’s A History of Heartache all seem to live alongside ghosts in their daily lives, in one way or another. For some, the memories of absent friends, loved ones, and antagonists stalk them in their thoughts, their houses, the streets of their Texan hometowns. For others, the haunting takes another form. Ghosts of a better life, somewhere, hang around the edges of every bad decision and near miss.