It’s an interesting time to be a writer – or reader – of short stories. Some wonderful and inspiring collections have come to light in the past few years and the form has seemed to have found its place in the literary jungle that is modern-day publishing. David Huebert’s short story collection, ‘Peninsula Sinking’, brings all of the beauty, grace and heartbreak that the form excels at and then rattles you with its imagery.
The collection opens with the CBC prize-winning ‘Enigma’; the story of a girl losing her horse, told through the lens of love , loss and memory. Huebert builds an architecture of broken bones and then proceeds to hang beautiful and lucid language upon it. His descriptions of damage, both human and animal, physical and emotional, are gorgeous and terrible at once.
This is a strong and telling start to the collection. The stories are full of moments of surreal and thick dreams. A sister wandering a hockey rink in search of her brother’s body (‘Drift’), a heart-broken prison guard being enwrapped by her pet boa constrictor in an act of serpentine self-destruction (‘Maxi’), an owl attacking a jogger’s weave in full sight of her crush (‘How Your Life’), these are strange yet familiar acts on a stage we recognize.
Animals feature heavily here (Huebert is rumored to be doing a PhD at Western in the presence of animals in literature), but not only animals, their death and decay. Rotting whale carcases, a herd of cows struck by lightning, a ‘deadstock’ truck that is described as a ‘goblin chariot roofed with a thatch of cadavers’. These are singular descriptions that ring true and chase you through the stories.
Nova Scotia is his setting for nearly everything, and he gives his home a sense of place within the mortar of the things he is building. One is mildly reminded of Colin Barrett’s collection ‘Young Skins’ and his fictional Irish town of Glanbeigh. There is flesh and history in the places he dwells. The ocean is ever-present, even when it is not.
Environmental collapse seems to whisper, just out of sight, until the end. It is not discussed but felt, rattling chains back stage, and Huebert speaks of these things in hushed tones. They are shadows in his world, flood and famine around the corner, but not here yet. He is also very comfortable with blood. Open wounds, injury and death squawk like crows from every story. One can easily picture him up to his elbows in a carcass, studying how the flesh looks and feels. The injuries are shared between animals and people, sometimes together, and Huebert seems to regard both as equals, or at least that the inequality between them is unjust.
There are dozens of passages from which I would love to quote, beautiful language is something Huebert makes feel effortless and natural, and I found myself waiting breathless for the next one. ‘They are sweaty and beautiful, blue eyes gleaming out of their cinnamon skin, and she is filled with a nausea of love’. He makes it look so easy, and almost never out-of-place (almost never). The physical expression of grief, held between two ribs in a sister’s side, feeling the pain of her brother’s loss, his body never recovered, these images and feelings stay with you.
From my readings, the one mere criticism I could voice would be a repetition of devices; a reader could find themselves looking for the animals and decay in each story as too familiar a totem. Upon re-reading, however, Huebert is so gentle and precise with his use of these, I ask myself if I am looking for wall rot in a dream home, there must be something to find.
The stories, eight in all, line up and strike at you from the page. By the time you finish ‘Horse People’, about a pregnant woman’s guilt and self-recrimination at having gone on a bender while carrying her baby, you are well braced for the final story. The title story is a novella length exploration of youth, memory and the shame that can follow us for decades. The three sections of the story bring into focus the parts of our lives we separate but live with and live within us.
It is also here that we encounter the events of global disaster. Following the crucial event of the story, a boy running down the street with a friend’s mother’s vibrator, we are faced with paragraphs describing rising water levels, drowning Halifax, New York, all coastal cities. This chord is struck head on and you can feel it reverberate back through the rest of the collection. Something I have not written about yet is Huebert’s sense of humor, which is in full swing in this story. His ability to find the funny and grotesque even among the wreckage of lives is inspiring and heartening.
This collection is remarkable, and it speaks to a talent that will be unfolding before us for some time. The best thing I can say is that I am waiting hungrily for what comes next. It is the standard refrain when one produces a collection like this, where is the novel? Are you working on it now? I have no doubt that Huebert will be producing a few of those, and they will be wonderful. But in my heart of hearts I am waiting for the next collection, the rooms full of wonder that will play tricks of light with our hearts and heads. There are forests behind this first sight of treeline, and I welcome the dark journey.
‘Peninsula Sinking’ is published by Biblioasis, and is available now.
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