(Transit Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY STEPHEN MORTLAND

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David Hayden writes stories that feel like magic tricks. They begin with something familiar, an object, an experience, a relationship. Then the stories shine, they distract the eye, they muddle the familiar to the point of its disappearance. The reader is left suspended, unsure, waiting, until, finally, the familiar returns. But it has been changed. What was once familiar, an object of disregard, has been made new, a rabbit pulled back from the invisible world of the magician’s hat. Reading Hayden’s debut collection, Darker with the Lights On, is both a visceral and an intellectual experience. The stories occupy the space of dreams. The fiction is unbound by rules, or at least unbound by the rules that dictate our experience. It is, in fact, the boundlessness and unpredictability of the stories that allow them to so adequately reflect our experience of living in an ever fluctuating and tenuous world.

“Many years have passed since I stepped off the ledge.” So opens Darker with the Lights On. “Egress,” the first story in the collection, is a monologue from the mind of a man perpetually falling from the top of a building. This unruly marriage of motion and permanence is representative of the rest of the stories in the collection as well. They evoke the dream phenomena of immobility, our legs churning and yet nothing really changes. The stories are filled with a sense of mystery with no direct object. We piece together clues to solve a dilemma we have not been able to articulate.

I expected to be cold but the air was mild, the speed delicious, the freshness vast and edible. I remember looking up briefly to see my fellow directors staring with alarm through the boardroom window. All except Andrew, who pinched his tie, smiled and waved.

I stopped of a sudden on the air, all my mass returned to me, seemingly in the pit of my stomach, my arms and legs flopped forward, and I gazed down to see a woman with a chestnut bob staring up – I was definitely too far away to tell it was a chestnut bob. She looked away, down at her feet or towards the door of the yellow cab that had just pulled in to the kerb, and I began falling again as quickly as before; and the cab door opened and, as she stepped in, she glanced at me again, and again I paused, juddered in the sky, and I heard the door thump closed – I was probably too far away to hear the door thump closed – and I began falling all over again with fresh delight. I sang, and the stale, old words tore away from my mouth and up towards where my life had been. (“Egress” excerpt)

The collection, put out by Little Island Press in the UK and Transit Books in the US, is beautifully rendered and meticulously crafted. Each sentence is a labyrinth, each word in conversation with the words surrounding it. Vocabulary is liberally appropriated to fit the purposes of the imagery. The resulting language is entirely innovative and startling—symbolic without submitting to easy analogy, metaphors built entirely of association. The language resists mere interpretation and is hell-bent on gaining its own autonomy. It becomes a moving, acting force in the stories alongside character and scene. The stories are as much about the shifting and capricious movements of the language as they are about the decisions and impulses of the main actors. There is no sentence in the collection that is without a trace of Hayden’s singularly distinct eccentricity or off-kilter idioms.

The radio comes on loud in the yellow bedroom. I feel like my teeth are going to fall out. My teeth fall out and then fall back in again. I get up and the sofa’s skin stretches and snaps back to itself. I stumble for the stairs. Light is washing and blinking around the trembling frame of the bedroom door. The handle rattles. I know I will be shocked if I touch it. There’s a rushing sound behind me and I run into the bathroom waving steam away. The shower is on, yellow, green, red, silver sweet wrappers spray from the head into the tub and onto the floor. I close my eyes and grab the tap turning and turning, and when the flow stops I stand up and hear silence where the radio’s clamour was. I undress and get into the bath, the heat and sweet perfume soothes me, frees me of the need to sleep that I have had for as long as I can remember.

In many of the stories, Hayden presents a version of a traditional horror or mystery story, immaculately stripped to its barest essentials. In this narrative minimalism, the absurd is highlighted and space is created wherein Hayden inserts strange emotional energy and a sense of vulnerability. Often the central horror of a story is obscured—introduced quickly and just as quickly forgotten in the flutter of linguistic flourishes. A home invader is hiding throughout a house, but we watch as a loaf of bread scuttles and presses itself against the side of a bread bin. A woman is sobbing on a sofa, but the reader is carried along a wintry beach with the sky, a vast anvil, hovering over it. Nowhere is this obscured horror more severe than in “The Bread that was Broken.” A charred corpse with an accompanying place card labeled “Thomas” is carried out and set on display amidst a dinner party. The body is introduced without explanation, Hayden’s exacting language employed in service of the truly horrific.

A fierce, continuous hissing came from the great platter and a dense weave of odours: scorched wool, bad fat, warm urine and excrement, and the bitter, chemical stink of blood. The bearers stepped away from the table. There on the platter was the blackened, smoking corpse of a man.

Moments later we are lost in the absurdist dialogue of the guests, bantering in ways that feel fraught with peculiarity about domestic matters of marriage and children. Just as the body is nearly out of mind, it returns to the narrative for updates on its cooling and cracking, its shifting and bending, the pooling of its fat and the smell of the smoke rising off of it. Given the absurdity of the charade and the strangeness of the characters, one is tempted to read the story as a sort of surrealist satire leveled at the entire human endeavor, a pained mockery of guests and corpse alike. But midway through the story, Hayden reflects on the corpse with a sincerity that makes tragic what had previously been merely symbolic.

His wrecked eye and his good eye both blind, his brain complete and darkened, all electricity gone and with it the mind. The mind that knew, or thought it knew, the purpose of taking a daily walk, of a regular haircut, of holding open a door to a woman and nodding slightly as she passed to own, momentarily, whatever faint perfume might be on the warm air closest to her hair or neck. The purpose of being Thomas.

Nineteen stories make up the collection, and, even though death and danger are constant themes, it should not be assumed that all are as macabre as the story above. A large talking crow, godlike in its abilities and its self-conception, descends to save a man in “Remains of the Dead World.” The crow goes on to (maybe) usher in the apocalypse. In “Hay,” the mine in a small town is nearly ruined with flooding when anyone who steps inside is inexplicably overcome with torrents of tears. Reading, a story about a man with a theory of a sort of literary afterlife, is a Borgesian romp that turns in on itself, forcing the reader to question the very shaky boundaries of the story’s reality. Two of my favorite stories in the collection are buried near the end, no more than a page and a half each, “After the Theatre” and “Light” are strange and poetic love stories, in celebration of commitment and in fear of love vanishing. Hayden is an expert at crafting unsettling opening sentences and endings that reframe the entire story preceding it. Often in a sentence, sometimes with only a word or two, he provides a reinterpretation that demands a second and closer reading of the story.

The collection boasts a great versatility in content, but what is most impressive from this debut is the distinct singularity and confidence of Hayden’s voice and style. The stories are not overly-beholden to his influences, and they set themselves apart by their lyricism, their minimalism, and their bold strangeness.

I found myself returning to a sentence from the story of the charred and burning man. The language encapsulated for me what I find so unique and moving in Hayden’s writing and the result of his obvious toiling over the text.

“The guests were calmed and charged, they luxuriated; the dinner enlarged what was already there.”

It would be both honest and misleading to say that not very much happens in these stories—that the rabbit, once pulled from the hat, is still a rabbit. Perhaps a more apt way of explaining it, though, is to say that David Hayden’s stories take and enlarge what is already there.

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Stephen Mortland lives in Indiana. His book reviews have appeared in or are forthcoming from Entropy Magazine, Necessary Fiction, 3:AM Magazine and Full Stop Magazine. His fiction has appeared in XRAY Literary Magazine, Faded Out, and Five:2:One (forthcoming). You can find him online @stephenmortland.