The three novellas that comprise Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter were the perfect read after the two longer pandemic novels (Severance and Station Eleven). They go back to Willa Cather subject matter: the hardscrabble ordinary lives of the mid-west and west in-between Americans of the 1870-1920 period. Incomes are rising rapidly and children increasingly are becoming well-educated and leaving the small farm towns. You can see plainly how the next generation is full of possibilities, but the probability of falling back are ever-present. Illness, “old mortality,” is everywhere. Nowhere more dramatic than Pale Horse, Pale Rider where death arrives unheralded in the middle of a banal paragraph about opening letters. When that sentence hits you, I bet every reader looks up and sighs, “Whew.” The prose is a bit as if you took Willa Cather and James Joyce together: everything is perfect and there are little shifts of point of view from sentence to sentence that are truly remarkable. Lots of history: Porter was a keen observer obviously and the novels are filled with little details and asides that pop up in dialogue that have you running to Wikipedia.