Strange, macabre stories delight

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/06/2023 (837 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Homebodies is the first short-story collection by Calgary poet/fiction writer Amy LeBlanc. The title of the opening story, Twisted, could be joined with that of the last one, Body Fluid Spill Kit, to describe the 16 stories dealing with death in many guises, blood, burials, scars, wounds, dead animals and invasive medical procedures involving needles and drips.

Throughout the first two sets of stories the Cerulean fever hovers in the background, like COVID. The story-as-interview, Transcription, is a tense, insidious summing up of the contagion, as both anonymous interviewer and subject play a cat-and-mouse game about how the fever affected their lives. Like all the stories in this book of seemingly ordinary people caught in the mess of their families’ histories, the two reflect the stink of death which haunts many of the stories.

Two of the best, Bruised Plums and Body Fluid Spill Kit, are beautiful, scary ghost stories. In the former, Plum is (maybe) receiving calls from her dead grandmother (it should be noted grandmothers don’t come off well in LeBlanc’s stories, not that aunts or grandfathers do any better).

Alone in her grandmother’s creepy townhouse, Plum remembers grandma’s obsession with noises in the night. She recalls a childhood experience involving her grandmother’s calling out — but perhaps it was a dream. The cellphone lights up and quivers; her head fills with static. When grandmother is finally buried all should end, shouldn’t it? But the lights flicker and what seems clear to Plum becomes unclear. It is to LeBlanc’s strength that one story’s scariness and edge of inviting horror can slip so easily into another.

The ghost story of Body Fluid Spill Kit sees a mother on her way to a school meeting concerning her daugther’s increasingly disturbing (bordering on evil) behaviour. Unfortunately for the mother, Evelyn, there is, she believes, a dead body in the backseat. The question: who is haunting whom?

Evelyn carries on with her day, considering the body a logistical problem — will it be noticed? Should her daughter sit next to it? — while the occasional intercession, written in the second person, speaks of a body disintegrating. Which one? The body in the car, if there is one? Evelyn herself?

This breakup of the body reflects back to The Fridge Light, where Liv has a lock on her fridge door because food fuels her disgust in a battle with her body as it breaks down — heading to death, which might be a release.

Cherry Pit has a mortician, Hollie, meet an unamed lepidopterist (butterfly collector), whom we also follow in Mourning Cloak. Both are caught in the fever — Hollie reminded daily, while the lepidopterist hardly notices it, living alone surrounded by pinned butterflies, including the Mourning Cloak.

The two stories disturb because of the closeness of death — the protagonists of both stories being so comfortable with it from childhood — yet are strangely encouraging. Both mortician and lepidopterist understand their lives, no matter how odd they seem.

If the cumulative strangeness seems too much, a late story, Wharf, would seem relief. More conventional in approach, it relates a lake reunion of just-out-of-college kids in unsteady relationships. But it ends with a possible drowning. Again, LeBlanc surprises and disturbs, to the reader’s intense anguish — in this collection’s case, a good thing.

Rory Runnells is a Winnipeg freelance writer.