Tag: Samantha Hunt

‘Cortés the Killer’ by Samantha Hunt

This story of a brother and sister grappling with the death of their father is ruminative and dark, like all of Samantha Hunt’s compelling collection The Dark Dark. The sibling grief is as sharp and unexpected as a beloved farm horse cracking the ice of a pond on a shopping centre building site, then drowning in it.

“The horse is twisting and snorting. She screams as much as a horse can scream. Clem raises his hands to his face. He takes another step towards the horse. ‘Clem,’ Beatrice repeats his name a third time. He turns to look at her. A seam has been cut open in Clem through the center of his face. A seam that says there is no way to stop this. No way for a man to save a horse drowning in freezing water. Clem brings his hands up to his ears and, pressing the small knobs of cartilage there, he stops listening.”

First published in The New Yorker as ‘Three Days’, January 2006, and available to subscribers to read here, and collected in The Dark Dark, Corsair 2018

‘The Story of Of’ by Samantha Hunt

I think about this story all the damn time. It is really the second part of a story, in that it is best to read ‘The Story of’ from the same collection first—but, then, you really have to as it is the story that opens this collection and ‘The Story of Of’ is the one that closes it. The stories both deal with a character named Norma, but where the first is a story that functions as a closed ecosystem, the latter is a story that continues to move and branch and shift in thrillingly meta-textual ways. As the Normas of this story become aware of their existence inside of a story, the text is indented farther and farther across the page, a great example of a writer pushing against the boundaries of what can happen on a page and the possibility of what might happen if you could jump off of it.

First published in The Dark Dark, FSG Originals, 2017