by Amy LeBlanc
ENFIELD & WIZENTY
2023/$22.95/168 pp.
Pandemic texts now abound, whether overt or only suffused with the sense of unsettlement and uncertainty we’ve all experienced over the last couple of years. Amy LeBlanc’s creepy collection of modern-day ghost tales strikes an accurate tone in the face of these discombobulated circumstances. Divided into three parts that all attend to domestically gothic symbology (“fox,” “fever dream” and “body,” all in a home environment), the deceptively simple language and direct narration conceal an underground world of incessant germs, strange surgeries, omnipresent ashes and corpses, the deaths of birds and cats, and a quavering atmosphere of relentless illness and oddity.
LeBlanc possesses a facility with metaphor—“his hair was the colour of rusted nails,” “[her] jacket was a shade of yellow that reminded me of highlighters I’d bought in university but had never actually used,” “[the] baby’s lips were the colour of raspberry juice”—but often lets the details settle nakedly on the page, carving out an unheimlich order of events in a chillingly definite syntax: “She took the syringe from the fridge 30 minutes ago…. [She] pinches a bit of fat from her belly… [she] breathes in” or “Liv tightened her grip around the worm… licked her lips, looked at the watermelon boy, then lifted the worm to her mouth and dropped it straight down her throat.”
As mood is so dominant in this collection, the reader may take awhile to delve into the unyielding parade of darkness. Once the plunge is taken, the payoffs are satisfying. The best reads transform the everyday, and stories such as “Cherry Pit,” with its compelling history of mortician rituals (a story that segues into “Funeral Cloak” through the unnerving character of a lepidopterist), “The Fridge Light,” where a daughter with food issues must serve a mother a meal of Alphagetti that drops into the pot with “a sound like vomit hitting the floor,” and the final tale, “Body Fluid Spill Kit,” in which a mother must buy a “little vanilla scone” for a corpse that randomly ends up sitting in the back seat of her car, all effect that transformation. LeBlanc interposes questions, transcriptions, instructions and other forms of text within her narrations, some of which enhance the story even as others prove a bit distracting.
Amazingly, humour appears amid all the grimness, as with the banner at the bridal party that reads “SAME PENIS FOREVER!” as well as weird and thwarted moments of care between the young and the old. Homebodies is about the living who are isolated, the deceased who infiltrate our quotidian realms, and all those lacunas that quiver between—uncanny and sometimes welcome spectres of love.
Catherine Owen is an author and editor in Edmonton.
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