Paige Clark

"I made a deal with God.
He stands on my veranda and asks after my husband.
We are not married, I say."

Paige Clark's She Is Haunted opens with these raw and striking lines, setting the stage for this powerful and poignant collection of short fiction that contemplates strained mother-daughter relationships, identity, and inter-generational trauma, especially within the context of transnational Asian identity. These first lines unfold expectations of Clark's simple and yet entrancing voice that weaves a series of thematically linked and contextually illusive narratives.

"I'm not sure you know what that feels like."

Clark's style is gorgeously refined, treading on the edge of the supernatural at times, but overall, this work reads as a wandering collection of memories, futures, and intimate vignettes traversing the strange, subtle landscape of daily life, if not as the reader experiences it, then rather through the eyes of the narrator, fictional or not. There is a certain defiance found in such simple lines as the one above, the language never forcing complexity or sacrificing elegance to get its point across. Still, it's deeply immersive and heavily thematic; a collection that I devoured in a single sitting.

"I wear his suit like a skin. It fits me perfectly."

As much as transformation is a reoccurring theme throughout the stories themselves, there is a sense that each story itself is transforming into the next. This collection at times seems largely unconnected save for repeated names (Are they the same characters? It's hard to say.) and general related considerations; at other times, there is the overwhelming feeling that they have the same distinct fictional world in common, one that mostly resembles our own, but takes many of the concepts we already experience just a step further, tactfully slipping in mentions of the future of global warming, the pandemic, and other sociological implications that have not progressed as far in reality as they do in this fictional universe, but yet seem likely to do so in the future. In this way, there is very nearly an element of science-fiction dystopia within the pages of this otherwise very realistic fictional work.

This is one of the first modern works of fiction that I've read that does address the pandemic and the global warming crisis in a way that feels at once dystopian, contemporary, and accurate. The unsettling nature of much of the prose pervades through personal and widespread struggles alike and digs the reader's heels in even more deeply because of it. Transient identity, relationships, grief, cultural truthfulness all maintain the same level of importance as God (the character), environment, global emergencies, etc.

"How can I be a mother when I don't know how to be a daughter?"

And of course, the elephant in the narrative: the strained mother-daughter relationships will always call to me, especially in these abstract, contemplative literary fiction works. One of the biggest complaints about this collection is that it's vague and hard to follow, but to me the apparent themes throughout were more important than the narrative itself. In this way, the collection in its entirety felt somewhat Aesop's fable-esque, albeit without a specific moral lesson. Focusing solely on the progression of the narratives will most likely leave you wondering "now what?", but in my opinion, the true value of this collection is the striking, unsettling prose and the adept considerations on womanhood, grief, self, existentialism. The "now what" never mattered. Clark brings the reader to the cliff's edge, but never asks them to jump, letting them attend to this part of the ritual of reading this work alone.

"I'll give you all the nothing I've got and more.

Overall, I was enamored with Clark's prose, found myself deeply immersed in each individual story, and know this work will be sticking with me for a while. My favorites across this strange collection were "Elisabeth Kubler-Ross", "Amygdala", and "Dead Summer", but again, there was not a weak sentence in this entire collection. Clark is as deliberate as she is descriptive, as vivid as she is vicarious, and I know I'll be looking eagerly for her next release.

"I sleep well and dream of my mother."… (altro)