Katie Jean Shinkle’s stirring novella, Ruination, presents the reader with an iconographical ecosystem of American sorrow. I consider it to be among the most necessary books of our time, for its channeling of contemporary psychic horrors and its candid treatment of potential societal fallout, as it documents the perennial violence stamped on the bodies of women and girls. Their bodies are distended, with dystopian speed, by vegetation and aggressive flowers. Young women exposed to this epidemic are quarantined or otherwise […]