The Dark and Other Love Stories

March 6, 2017
Willis’s (Vanishing) collection casts a wide net in the search for love. The mélange of characters and plot lines teases at the intricate warp and weft of human (and other) interactions, exploring the myriad lessons our most primal and complex emotion teaches us about identity, ambition, boundaries, connectedness, wanderlust, and addiction. In “Girlfriend on Mars,” a pot-growing slacker’s worst nightmare comes to fruition when his live-in girlfriend—“drug dealer, lapsed Evangelical Christian”—becomes a finalist for a spot on the first mission to the Red Planet. “Todd” examines the relationship among Eddie, a divorced loner; his 10-year-old daughter, Abby; and the eponymous crow who teaches them both about the vagaries of love. “Steve and Lauren: Three Love Stories,” a suite of brief pieces at the book’s end, recalls the work of fabulist Steven Millhauser in its 10-degrees-off-center rumination on murky realities, encapsulated in “The Nap,” in which Willis celebrates the delicious uncertainty of love and life: “Life seemed so solid once, but now had melted like Dalí’s watch and slipped through their fingers.” This is a poignant and fitting end to such an accomplished, vivid, and memorable collection.

November 15, 2016
Canadian story-writer Willis' second collection, following Vanishing and Other Stories (2010), confirms her debut's promise and extends its range.The 13 stories collected here include two free-standing but related tales featuring Eddie, a cable installer who in the first, "Todd," finds himself--recently banished and without custody of his 10-year-old daughter--sucked into a bewildering domestic partnership with a crow, a partnership that ends in explosive violence and sorrow. There's also a final triptych, "Steve and Lauren: Three Love Stories," in which Willis makes deft, delicate use of the unreal or magical (a literal hole in the living-room carpet, an extramarital infatuation that literally stops a watch from ticking, an enchanted time-traveling nap) first to defamiliarize a long and apparently stable, loving marriage--to make it strange--and then to persuade the reader to believe in it deeply, in all its messy particulars, and to find it heartbreaking. "Girlfriend on Mars" delivers just what its title promises: it is the first-person lament of a bereft young man, a cultivator of hydroponic marijuana, who discovers only belatedly that his girlfriend and business partner has tried out for a reality-show competition whose prize is the right to blast off (and never return) as one of the first two permanent settlers on the red planet. Other stories belong to a more traditional realist mode. As was the case in Willis' previous collection, several--for instance the title piece and "Welcome to Paradise," about two teens who break into houses for the brief, thrilling feeling of occupying someone else's life--center on female friendship, especially intense adolescent ones looked back upon in celebration and lament. These are low-key stories of great acuity, precision, and poignancy.

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