National Post (National Edition)
‘Chaos made beautiful’
SAMANTHA HUNT’S COLLECTION IS BLISSFULLY UNCONCERNED WITH GENRE DISTINCTIONS
Balance is overrated.
Take acclaimed novelist Samantha Hunt. Each of the stories in her stunning debut collection The Dark Dark is concerned less with finding balance than with capturing a dynamic equilibrium, a pulsing thrum between the beautiful and the disorienting, between epiphany and tragedy, and, crucially, between the domestic and the uncanny.
The stories in The Dark Dark are largely realistic, rooted in the lives of emotionally isolated individuals — “work and school, laundry, dinner” — but these are not drab, capital-L Literary stories, steeped in minimalism and longing. The stories in The Dark Dark also feature transformation into animals, sex robots, reanimation and doppelgängers, but the collection isn’t science fiction or fantasy, either. Nor — and this is key — are the stories concerned with straddling genres, or blurring the line between genre and literary; rather, Hunt approaches the material with a seeming unawareness of genre and conventions. These stories are truly sui generis, utterly unique, and highly skilled.
The volume’s tone and approach are clear from the opening line of the first story, The Story Of: “In a coffee shop on Dead Elm Street, Norma arranges chicken bones on her plate, making an arrow that points to her stomach, where the chicken now resides.” The prose is straightforward but not plain (“resides,” in this context, seems to straddle life and death: the word usually refers to where someone, or something lives, not where they are being digested), the situation seemingly unremarkable, but there is something evocative here. Is it the use of “Dead Elm Street,” which registers, first, as odd (we’ve all seen an Elm Street in our daily life, and our nightmares, but “Dead Elm” is strange), then as allusive, with symbolic echoes of both female power and the underworld? Similarly, the arrangement of chicken bones has an air of the ritualistic about it, a power of conjuring or soothsaying. The sentence — which introduces a story of a woman struggling with fertility which shifts into something distinctly different — is dense, but its great strength is its unobtrusiveness: the power of the line registers subliminally at first, accruing force within the reader’s mind unawares.
The great majority of the sentences in the collection operate in the same register, active on both conscious and subconscious levels, leading to multiple levels of understanding and clarity amidst, sometimes, outright confusion.
In All Hands, for example, the near drowning of a Coast Guard officer and the phenomenon of thirteen pregnant high school girls seem unconnected until Hunt weaves them together at both narrative and symbolic levels (the story also features a sublime moment that will remind readers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but the less said of that the better). Or take Beast, in which a woman tries to figure out how tell her husband that she has, of late, been transformed into a deer after he goes to sleep, only to have the story turn into an exploration of fidelity, domestic life and marital compatibility. Sort of.
The stories in The Dark Dark unfold with the primal force of fairy tales — the original ones, before Disney got hold of them. Love Machine, in fact, begins with the line “Once upon a time two men lived at the bottom of a missile silo” to introduce the story of a government agent in charge of Operation Bombshell. Wayne, the agent, has created a sex robot designed to lure Ted Kaczynski — the Unabomber — out of his remote cabin, where the robot will explode, ending his murderous spree. The story, however, shifts into an exploration of the nature of love, of humanity, of need, with an ending that is utterly heartrending.
The Dark Dark, more than anything else, is an example of the sheer force of storytelling, of the power of narrative to elicit understanding and emotional response at an unspeakable, unspoken level. Nowhere is this clearer than in The Story Of Of, the final story in the collection, which begins as an explicit repetition of The Story Of.
Or so it seems. Once again, there’s something just a little bit off.
“In a coffee shop on Dead Elm Street, Norma rearranges chicken bones on her plate, making an arrow that points at her stomach, where the chicken’s meat now resides,” the story begins. An echo, not a repetition, slight changes that might go unnoticed without the reader checking back. The story takes the template of The Story Of and shifts it, repeatedly, changing an element here and there, restarting the story and shifting again, and again. Every new instance of the story reduces it, parses it, changing the narrative, the resonances, every iteration altering the reader’s understanding not only of this story, but of stories overall. What seems at the outset as perhaps a stylistic experiment pays off, repeatedly, at an emotional level, never losing sight of the characters, a regressive storytelling that spirals on the page and in the reader’s mind, looping fractally, perhaps endlessly, the shape of chaos made beautiful.