by Richard Kelly Kemick
BIBLIOASIS
2024/$22.95/248 pp.
Hello, Horse is ex-Calgarian and new-ish Vancouverite Richard Kelly Kemick’s first collection of short fiction, which is not to say he isn’t seasoned at the short story. Nine of these 11 collected stories have been previously published, with the tenth shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s novella contest. His other books include I Am Herod (Goose Lane, 2019), a comical look at the Badlands Passion Play, and Caribou Run (Goose Lane, 2016), a collection of poems.
What makes Kemick a powerful writer is his range of emotional depth and subject matter, and the speed at which he establishes his narrative worlds. He wastes no time introducing a story; rather, he assumes the reader’s intelligence, beginning most stories at a healthy trot and some, such as “Our Overland Offensive to the Sea,” at a gallop.
Love (or longing for love), as well as a persistent sense that we are both snared by and performing within our environments, are key themes that emerge throughout the collection. Kemick’s characters seem to love while in another’s shadow. In the titular story, “Hello, Horse,” a young woman can’t quite tame and make tender a wild thing full of grief. Her revelation is that others exist outside of herself, within their own pain. In “Patron Saints,” our narrator loves a newly famous author whose memoir records a tragic love story that will forever shadow theirs. Our narrator waits in Paris for his lover to return from a high-profile book tour while a Bengal tiger prowls, loose from the zoo, both hunting and being hunted: “There’s a certain respect you’ve got to have for something that sticks around so long where it obviously shouldn’t.” In “Sea Change,” two British Columbia teachers attending a conference in politically tense Cuba flirt with adultery. Their affair never transpires, remaining constantly in a state of delay, but their ruminations on how their lives have led to this moment spark two very different personal revolutions. A young man is captivated by an older magician in “The Great and the Gone,” becoming her lover and her assistant. There’s a palpable distance between them, however, caused by a great loss: the only thing the magician has managed to make disappear but never find again is her own daughter.
Alongside explorations of lovers and longing, each story in Kemick’s collection is disarmingly comical, emotionally rich apart from and as a product of that comedy, and delightfully absurd. Throughout the book is a masterful tension in the idea that reality is always already stranger than it seems. From talking dogs to brutal, cross-checking nuns, Hello, Horse is smart writing.
Colby Clair Stolson is a writer from Ponoka.
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