Craig Davidson releases a powerful new collection of stories,
Craig Davidson’s first volume of short stories in 15 years is more contemplative than earlier work
In the theatre, a ghost light is a single incandescent bulb left burning after hours, while the rest of the theatre is unoccupied.
In practical terms, it’s a safety measure: With the building in complete darkness, it would be easy for an interloper who accidentally got locked in to trip off the edge of the stage and suffer serious injury. The more colourful tradition suggests that the light is left on to appease the ghosts that superstitious theatre folk believe must haunt their performance spaces.
Either way, the allusion is appropriate for the opening story in Craig Davidson’s second collection. “The Ghost Lights” features a mother and her infant son in a struggle for survival following an automobile crash. The accident has killed the driver, the woman’s husband, and left mother and child stranded in the desolate cold and snow of a Canadian winter. (It’s the closest this collection gets to a straightforward, Atwood-Frye approved work of wilderness CanLit.)
The title of the story is only the first instance in which Davidson inserts a kind of otherworldly foreboding into the narrative. In one of our first glimpses of Charlie, the infant, he is hanging upside down in the overturned car, like a “hangman.” Elsewhere, the mother, Claire, recalls her husband’s comment about Charlie: “You were born into dread, my son.” This is one of the staccato blasts of apparently disjointed language that opens the story, dropping the reader into Claire’s discombobulated and cluttered post-crash psyche in the manner of Stephen King’s “Misery” — another story about survival following an auto wreck in the dead of winter.
The allusiveness and technical finesse that Davidson wields here form a perfect entrée into “Cascade,” the author’s first collection of short fiction in15 years. The earlier volume, 2005’s “Rust and Bone,” comprised tough, sinewy stories that showcased Davidson’s facility for detail: The first paragraph of the title story, about a boxer, is a precise description of the bones in a human hand. He has not abandoned this in the new book, but the stories in “Cascade” are largely more contemplative than those in the earlier work, as befits an author at a different stage in his life (a point Davidson himself draws in his acknowledgments).
But Davidson’s stories retain their immediacy and gut-level emotion while also allowing for a lyricism in the writing that elevates the subject matter. Take this description from the opening of “Firebugs,” the collection’s last — and best — story: “Fire will grunt and growl and come at you with the soft slithering of a snake. It’ll howl around blind corners like a pack of wolves, and gibber up from flame-eaten floorboards and reverberate in a million other strange ways besides. Sometimes it sounds like buzzard talons clawing across pebbled glass. Other times, it’ll come for you silent as a ghost: a soft whisper of smoke curling back under a doorway, beckoning you to open it. That’s when it’s most dangerous — when it’s hiding its true face.”
The speaker here is Blaine Kennedy Jr., a fire investigator looking into a string of arsons that have been plaguing Cascade City, Davidson’s fictional version of Niagara Falls.
The story counterpoints Blaine’s investigation with his concern for his sister, a resident in a home for people suffering mental illness. Blaine understands fire so well in part due to his history as a former firefighter and onetime firebug himself; his concern for his sister arises in part out of a suspicion that she might have some sort of involvement in the recent spate of fatal arsons.
“Firebugs” is also typical of the stories in “Cascade” in that it resists closure, a feature that works in the stories’ favour on a dramatic and technical level.
The tactic is particularly acute in “One Pure Thing” a basketball story that ends in a moment of suspended animation, refusing to provide the reader with the elation or catharsis typical of a sports tale.
This is absolutely intentional: The point is not whether the scrappy Niagara Falls team (called the Cascades) wins or loses, nor is it whether the ex-con former pro baller brought out of retirement to groom a promising player finds redemption. The point is in the small moments, the careful attention to detail and emotional resonance that Davidson is so good at in his short fiction.
The point is in this description of basketball that rivals the depiction of fire in the later story: “The ball started going through more regularly; he drained ten in a row, the net snapping with the rotation of the ball. That sound. It’s music. It’s Aretha Franklin, it’s Van Morrison. No better sound on earth.”