Epiphanies of the Morbidly Bizarre in 'Something's Burning'
An escaped sea lion inspires a boy to run away from his sexually abusive swim instructor. A travelling nurse picks up a youthful hitchhiker who’s on his way to a custody battle. A jilted lover realizes she can wish death upon those who’ve wronged her. And a terminally ill woman embarks on her dream of swimming with dolphins.
The twenty-two stories in Janet Trull’s second collection, Something’s Burning, all spring from evocative setups like these, often veering into darker realms of death, sexual trauma, mental illness, and poverty. “The world has become a confusing place,” Trull writes on her website, “and the characters in these stories struggle with anger, intolerance, and disrespect.”
When these premises are successful, the end result is unquestionably powerful. In “Anna’s Last Day,” Trull weaves vignettes showing the protagonist’s disintegrating mental state with medical accounts summarizing the debilitating effects of her Huntington’s disease, with the story climaxing in her meticulously planned suicide attempt. Likewise, in “Hope,” a woman with the ability to wish death upon others tracks down a lost love interest, and after Trull reveals the truth about their past, readers will no doubt find the story’s final line incredibly satisfying when they discover that the love interest isn’t actually all that interested.
While stories like these contain powerful epiphanies, others, sadly, fall short of their mark, through shortcomings of narrative distance, ineffective organization, or both. In perhaps the biggest such example, “The Nook,” Trull devotes the first thirteen pages to a story of a long-ago romance at a family cottage before abruptly fast-forwarding to the present, where an overburdened daughter must deal with her schizophrenic father’s belief that his dead wife is having an affair with the deceased lover from the opening pages. Rather than serving the story, the segue jolts reader expectations and leads to Trull having to introduce all-new characters halfway through, creating an odd transition that doesn’t entirely deliver on its opening premise. A similar narrative rift shows up in “The Downer,” when a promising plot thread of turning the narrator’s decrepit family motel into elderly care housing fails to go anywhere, leaving this entertaining but somewhat aimless story with little in the way of resolution.
“The Nook” is ultimately a story about caregiving in which the problems of others become the main focus, much like “Thin Ice,” which epitomizes Trull’s use of a narrator’s distance from characters with more distressing experiences. When the story’s uncaring protagonist describes her out-of-control neighbour Sheila as “a giant wakeboard wave of unfortunate fuckups,” one can’t help but realize the protagonist’s dismissal of the greater tragedy: that of the unhinged neighbor Sheila, whose obsessive grief after a deadly accident functions as a catalyst for the narrator’s own, less powerful self-discovery. The same can be said of the public health nurse in “The Hitchhiker,” who becomes a passive victim of her youthful ridealong’s prescription pill theft, placing readers at a distance from the socioeconomic factors that led him to commit the act.
Though such structural choices will no doubt interfere with readers’ ability to find fulfillment in many of these stories, Trull’s prose is top-notch throughout with every story full of richly detailed moments and the author’s sharp observations. In “The Emperor’s Clothes,” a group of “progressive thinkers” are held up as such because “they know what all the letters in LGBTQ stand for,” reinforcing a small town’s naïve but well-meaning perspective on a transgender resident. In another line from “The Downer,” Trull follows the narrator’s memory of cleaning the motel pool with the observation that “Northern Ontario, it turned out, was not ideal for cement swimming pools that are not winterized properly” — a line that will no doubt resonate with anyone familiar with the challenges of pool maintenance.
Shortcomings aside, readers of Something’s Burning will no doubt discover numerous moving, powerful, and offbeat moments of their own, as each of the four sections contains its share of epiphanies that will ignite readers’ emotions.
Thank you to At Bay Press for providing Shrapnel with a media copy of Something’s Burning, which is available now for purchase at At Bay Press’s website and in bookstores across Canada.
Price: $24.95 CAD
ISBN: 9781988168685
Genre: Short Stories / Fiction
Pub date: November 1, 2022
Book Review
-
November 30,
2022
-
5-minute read
Ian M. Rogers
writes cool, funny literary fiction and is the author of MFA Thesis Novel, a metafictional comedy about academia. He taught English as a foreign language in Japan for many years, most recently at Kanagawa University in Yokohama. Find more at ianmrogersauthor.com.