Fiction writer Samantha Hunt has the capacity to tell a story that genuinely surprises, like her 2016 novel Mr. Splitfoot, which I read in a hot hurry, then immediately restarted because I wasn’t ready to be done with its mix of strangeness and surprise. That book flirted with something dark and occult, so I was intrigued by the title of Hunt’s new collection of stories, The Dark Dark. Would these tales go to darker and stranger places? The answer is yes—but, of course, Hunt never gives you quite what you expect.
In The Dark Dark, mysteries abound. Some are fantastical—why has a dead dog come back to life? Can a man love a robot? What does a woman’s affair have to do with her turning into a deer at night in her bedroom next to her husband? Others are more mundane: Did a 14-year-old seek to seduce a man in his thirties, knowing the trouble it would cause? Why can’t a woman who desires a child get pregnant?