Hell’s Kitchen (review)

In Hell’s Kitchen, Michael Arturo delivers a haunting, elegiac story about memory, guilt, and the corrosive myth of objective truth. Set in a claustrophobic New York apartment stacked with microfilm reels and the detritus of a life once dedicated to facts, the story follows Leonard Greaves, a retired newspaper archivist whose immaculate record-keeping begins to unravel under the weight of one headline that shouldn’t exist.

Arturo’s prose is clean and tightly coiled, like the spring inside a trap. From the first page, we’re drawn into Leonard’s world—a lonely, analog fortress where the past is supposed to stay fixed and knowable. But when he discovers a front page announcing the destruction of the Twin Towers dated 1998—not 2001—the fabric of his reality begins to tear. The story quickly evolves from literary character study to psychological thriller, with undertones of speculative horror and metaphysical dread.

What elevates Hell’s Kitchen beyond a simple tale of memory’s unreliability is its confrontation with personal cowardice and cultural denial. At the heart of Leonard’s collapse is a single night decades ago, when he fled from a moment of intimacy with a trans woman he had mistaken for someone else. That night—and his decision to erase it—becomes the fracture through which all other distortions leak. When a neighbor named Loretta, a trans woman herself, visits during a citywide blackout, she becomes both witness and interrogator, forcing Leonard to face the event he never truly filed.

The story is unflinching in its portrayal of generational disconnects: between what Leonard once considered “truth” and what his lived experience refuses to forget, between the crumbling moral certainty of the past and the unfinished, often uncomfortable humanity of the present. Arturo resists the temptation to make Leonard a simple villain; he’s frail, haunted, sometimes cruel—but also tragic in his belief that the past can be filed neatly if only the labels are correct.

The final pages are chilling. A lost news story about a murdered Mercury Lounge performer—possibly the same woman Leonard once kissed and abandoned—emerges from the archive like a long-suppressed confession. Whether it’s a hallucination, a ghostly intervention, or the system finally correcting itself is never made clear. Arturo isn’t interested in clarity. He’s interested in accountability.

Much like Toni Morrison’s Beloved or the paranoid fictions of Philip K. Dick, Hell’s Kitchen proposes that what we suppress will resurface—and often with a vengeance. In Arturo’s telling, history isn’t a clean record. It’s a haunted medium.

If there’s a flaw in the story, it’s that it pushes the boundaries of believability in its final confrontation. Leonard’s unraveling becomes operatic, even theatrical, as he lashes out at Loretta in an attempt to reclaim a reality that no longer wants him. But even here, Arturo’s instincts are sharp: the drama mirrors Leonard’s crumbling psyche. He’s not just a man afraid of truth—he’s afraid that truth no longer needs him.

Hell’s Kitchen is a work of fiction, but it feels like an autopsy report—on a man, on a profession, and on a city that once believed in the sanctity of the printed word. Arturo understands something too many writers forget: that the most terrifying erasure is not when someone forgets your story, but when they remember it and choose to rewrite it anyway.

Verdict: ★★★★½A taut, unforgettable meditation on memory, denial, and the shifting ground of historical truth. Michael Arturo has written a story that will linger like the faint glow of an old microfilm reel, still spinning in the dark.

Get full access to The City Between Us at michaelarturo.substack.com/subscribe