An earlier version of this review appeared in BC Bookworld in 2021. One of my top fiction reads of the year. Published by Caitlin Press in British Columbia who, I'm happy to say, have signed this brilliant author up for a second collection of flash fiction.
Twenty-four short stories are contained in Barbara Black’s debut collection and the cover art and design, also created by the author, is an intriguing collage of a masked woman caught in the headlights. Her streaked red hair is flying, her deer ears and antlers are alert and her mottled wispy coat seem to catch her in the act of transforming from human to animal or insect…or perhaps it’s the other way around. A clock on the wall suggests a Cinderella-like deadline is imminent. Clues abound in this cover image and the brilliant epigraph by Anton Chekhov: Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Some of these stories have been previously published in Canadian and American literary magazines like Geist and The New Quarterly. They have also been nominated for National Magazine Awards, the Journey Prize, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and won the Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition. Clearly, Barbara Black is a writer to read and furthermore, the back cover is replete with kudos from three established masters of the short fiction form: John Gould, Cathleen With and M.A.C. Farrant.
In much the same way many of us marvel at the ability of musicians to create something fresh and new with notes and rhythms and sounds, I also appreciate and admire writers who conjure up and harness a soaring imagination with linguistic dexterity and seamlessly mesh intellectual curiosity with a resonant emotional plumb line. What a treat it is to read these inventive, sometimes sad, and often funny stories by Barbara Black!
A “regular good guy” ends up in a coma and escapes to the wondrous insect world of his Grade 7 Science project. A retired acrobat encounters a retired dentist, both lonely insomniacs. One little girl rejects all that is fluffy, pink and pretty and drags her perfectionist traditional mother and playful papa into seeing another world of colours, textures and behaviours. Insects inhabit many of these stories, a fascinating fusion of science and imagination, with Kafka’s classic Metamorphosis hovering near by in many readers’ minds, no doubt. As Bert, who flies off eagerly to his liberation from a body trapped in a coma thinks; “What did it matter? Only the law of dreams applied.”
The seared memories of childhood are especially poignant in stories like ‘Hot July Day’ where a Grade 5 bully and her accomplice fail to repress the resilience of an undersized, long-suffering classmate. Then we are whisked away to the Bulkley/Nechako region of northwest B.C. where a solitary man, a taxidermist, forms a protective bond with a porcupine he calls Lydia. The trees in his valley are succumbing to a pine beetle infestation and the threat of fire in mid-summer is high. ‘Belly-Deep in White Clover’ is a soulful story about life and death in the wilderness which was first published in Prairie Fire and then long-listed for the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. It demonstrates yet again Black’s range of subject and setting and her mastery of ever-elusive tone or to use the musical equivalent, pitch, which is never flat or sharp but bang on.
So perfectly attuned to the wild and the domestic as well, is the story, ‘Ghosts on Pale Stalks’ where nature on the West Coast is evoked in all its damp and fecund abundance. A single middle-aged woman is carrying an urn, at the urging of her group of somewhat exasperated friends, through the rainforest and to the ocean’s edge. Easier by far for others to tell us to “just let go” than it is to discard the physical and emotional burdens we’ve carried for decades. Or before finally giving up on advice from Oprah or sifting through whatever insights tarot cards seem to offer by taking decisive action to save our own sanity.
There is seemingly no limit to the inventive breadth and depth of the worlds Black conjures, with writing precisely embedded in each setting. The title story exemplifies her mastery of story structure and dialogue and what I call the alchemy of creating fiction. In ‘Music From a Strange Planet’ we meet Lucky Bee, who experiences both prescient abilities, for impending good news and bad, and the kind of synaesthesia which merges colour with sound, for example, magenta becomes F#major while viridian is heard as B minor. Her companion is a cricket. Given the number of insects fluttering through this book, I know I am less inclined to mindlessly swat them in future.
Prepare to be transported to cities, to other countries, to a crumbling present and then off to a Centre for Biogenetics on an unnamed planet in the future. Still more worlds unfold like wings in this marvellous book, and beguile us. Reader, prepare to be enchanted.
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