The cover art of Thea Prieto’s debut novella coupled with its title, From the Caves, invited this reviewer immediately to consider Plato’s famed Allegory of the Cave. Plato’s fire, however, is a projector of shadows, a dim replacement of the sun, while Prieto’s is so much more. The fires of From the Caves are creatures of destruction and consumption: the cataclysmic Great Fires that broke the world, the bonfire funeral pyre. However, fires are also tools essential for survival; they are cooking fires, boilers of water in pots, and the source of firelight to ease the Dark Sickness of cave living. The fires of From the Caves are a central exhibit in a text intimately concerned with these themes of both mending and consumption.