I'm kind of familiar with the northwest corner of Michigan's lower peninsula, having lived there in a previous lifetime — bleak, economically depressed, the sort of place you imagine meth labs flourish as thick as urban crack houses, the solitude a little noir, vaguely menacing, if ultimately serene, even sedate.

So I find Rosie Forrest's stories in Ghost Box Evolution in Cadillac, Michigan eerily familiar, almost like living–room gossip from my long-ago youth. For while the protagonists are invariably transgressive teenage girls pushing up against the forbidden, the stuff their parents have warned them about, they are ultimately just a part of a larger adult drama over which nobody has any control.

"The summer our parents moved from the Great Lake to a good one, we were shipped to Possum Kingdom, Texas, to visit a distant cousin and his wife," the story "Possum Kingdom" begins. The kids have no choice here: they are "shipped" like so much cargo without having any voice in the decision, as a consequence of their parents' downward mobility or perhaps marital difficulties (they move from "Great" to "good"; Forrest always only hints at circumstances without spelling them out explicitly). As its name suggests, Possum Kingdom is another bleak shithole. Here, the two juvenile sisters are themselves faced with a choice between the lesser of two horrors, a scary furtive thing in the basement or the sight of their aunt, upstairs, having a stroke.

Similarly, in "Unmoored," King, an adolescent boy, seems to have been abandoned by his mother, negligently left in the care of his creepy Uncle Bart, while his mother absconds to Thunder Bay, "the hometown she had drop–kicked eleven years ago after tangling with King's father." King is left to cope, with no experience or guidelines to follow.

And just as in "Possum Kingdom" where the family's circumstances are only alluded to obliquely, so in the story "Moonbone" the father seems to have died in a hunting accident, which results in the narrator's older brother Lucca being denied a rifle for his twelfth birthday, a bitter disappointment which itself holds the threat of incipient violence. Lucca claims to have found a fragment of the moon, and while the narrator knows this isn't so, more likely a deer bone from another hunting season, they pretend it is so, and they stand there in the dark, "half-daring the moon to sail down and collect the fallen fragment of himself, but knowing full well we'd never let go." You can just feel their stubborn, childish defiance even in the face of futility, knowing it's a formula for some later tragedy.

Forbidden places, themselves forbidden precisely for some unarticulated danger they contain, also figure into these stories of teenagers in a hopeless, dreary landscape confronting their boundaries. In the title story, a group of kids take over a bunch of abandoned "big box" stores — Best Buy, Sears, Border's — businesses that couldn't make it in that beat–up area — becoming something like the feral boys in Golding's Lord of the Flies. "The times demand it. But I think of my fair–skinned brother, and in a different year, a different decade, he would have built a tree house; an ear for music, he might have joined a band." In "We'll Go No More A–Roving," it's an abandoned, off–limits church the kids finally muster the courage to trespass, overcoming even their own taboos, fears that the basement is "diseased." ("Now that we have found our way inside, our fear of the place feels dim and hard to draw.") Cautious, they had surveyed it from the outside first, skittish as cats, "peeking through Mary's robe" into the interior, Forrest's stunning way to describe peering in through the stained-glass window.

And in "What Happened on Wednesdays (As Told by Someone Who Probably Wasn't There)," the kids take over Jesse's basement — another dark spooky basement as the ones in "Possum Kingdom" and "We'll Go No More A–Roving," which we know from Stephen King novels is always ominous, threatening — and make their own rules, set up their own kingdom.

Indeed, not all of these stories necessarily take place in that region of northern Michigan, though many have place-names that locate them there, but they all have this sense of being unmoored, cut loose, abandoned, of territory in which adults as well as kids must make their own laws, determine their own boundaries, find their own way to a sense of completeness, just like the moon in "Moonbone": "way up there the moon is aching to be full, one more inhale and it's there."

Note: Ghost Box Evolution in Cadillac, Michigan is the winner of the 2015 Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook contest. Pamela Painter was the judge.