Wandering down the rabbit hole of David Huebert’s second collection of short stories, Chemical Valley, feels a bit like a chemical trip of another sort—a communal, self-induced poisoning—one that starts as an entertaining diversion and ends as an unsettling mind-expansion. A journey that finds you wound-up, wrung out, but somehow left buoyant and comforted at the same time.
Huebert’s stories all revolve around its title’s namesake: Sarnia, Ontario is Chemical Valley—the epicenter of a dark, unspooling, often-unnamed dread. Some of the anthropogenic and anthropologic tragedies are clearly spelled out, relatable even: polluted waterways, an accident at the refinery, dead pigeons, natural gas explosions, divorce, affairs, the seduction of minors, “humane” pest control, a sex doll to deal with crushing loneliness, a killer pandemic, the ambivalence of childrearing, fires that swallow whole towns. Other tragedies take on a more Cronenberg-esque magic realism. The words on the page turn into pictures in your mind that quickly slide sideways from your known (or accepted) reality: a dead mother in the basement sludge hole, vodka-soaked tampons, a mysterious illness slowly killing a wife, maggots nibbling on fungi-infected flesh, self-lubricating robot genitalia, a dead man sealed inside a frozen horse, a thoughtful and intelligent hockey goon. But here’s the catch—we’re watching these mini Cronenberg films on mute, as Huebert leaves us to fill in the dialogue. The leaded, toxic weight of each story is most accurately measured by what isn’t said. We’re given the image of a father, sucking the pulled teeth of his wife, in memory of their dead babies: “savouring the salt of the gone” (“Leviathan”).
