Out of the Window, Into the Dark is the latest fiction collection from Marian Womack, who was kind enough to send me a copy for review. The collection comes out November 16 from Calque Press, and is available for pre-order now.
The stories are divided into two sections, the first grouping primarily set in the future, looking at how the world and technology may change, but also reflecting on the past and what might be lost. “Pink-Footed” depicts a future where birds and many other animals have largely gone extinct, and as a result, food is scarce. While set in the future, the manners and speech of the characters harken back to another age. “The Museum” explores how memories are captured, and how technology impacts the way we remember and re-experience moments in the past. There’s an underlying thread of melancholy, nostalgia, and anxiety running through the stories – again, expressing fear and concern for the future while also looking back to the past.
The second section’s stories are set in the present day, but still resonate with unease and anxiety. Two of the standouts for me in the collection as a whole were “Ready or Not”, which effectively draws on horror imagery as the protagonist imagines then catches sight of her elderly neighbor silently standing just on the other side of the fence as if staring toward her property, her appearance subtly wrong and uncanny. Alongside the suggestion of supernatural horror, the story also deals with real world horror, with the protagonist stuck in an oppressive marriage full of microaggressions where her husband controls the finances and uses her status as an immigrant to further exert control. Unease hangs over the story with the edges of reality blurring and questions regarding the objective truth of the situation left unanswered.
The other stand out was the titular “Out of the Window, Into the Dark”, in which the protagonist recalls an obscure comic book series she and her friends were obsessed with as children, in which a stranger would appear at children’s windows in the middle of the night and take them flying out into the dark to witness things they shouldn’t – in particular the town’s secrets. She also recalls an incident as a child where she came down with a fever and hallucinated, or experienced, a journey right out of the comics, flying to the home of a man known as Odd Paul, and discovering a missing boy held captive in his shed. She and her friends go on to stage an improbable rescue, but afterwards, the boy swears up and down that Odd Paul died by spontaneous combustion allowing him to escape and that equally improbable story becomes the official one. Like other stories in the collection, it effectively explores the unreliability of memory, the way narratives shape our experience of the world, and blurring between reality, dreams, and imagination.
