“Can’t you already kind of guess what’s going to happen?”
“No.”
“Well, I can.”
“Then go ahead, guess.”
“Well. Either good will win—”
“Or else bad will.”
“Yeah, but which one is it?”
“Good or bad?”
“I can’t quite tell yet.”
“Well, guess,” Norma says. “Guess.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to the MacDowell Colony, the Peter S. Reed Foundation, Pratt Institute, and Bard College. Thank you, Jeannette Haien Ballard. Thank you, PJ Mark, Jenna Johnson, and Joe Hagan. I also gratefully acknowledge the magazines and anthologies where these stories were originally published:
Tin House: “All Hands” and “Beast”
The New Yorker: “The Yellow” and “Cortés the Killer” (as “Three Days”)
FiveChapters: “The House Began to Pitch”
This Is Not Chick Lit: “Love Machine”
H.O.W. and The Sunday Times: “Wampum”
ALSO BY SAMANTHA HUNT
Mr. Splitfoot
The Invention of Everything Else
The Seas
PRAISE FOR SAMANTHA HUNT
Mr. Splitfoot
A New York Times Editors’ Choice
“Samantha Hunt’s every sentence electrifies. Her book contains everything that I want in a novel. If I could long-distance mesmerize you, dear reader, into picking up this book and buying it and reading it at once, believe me: I would.”
—Kelly Link
“[Mr. Splitfoot] will haunt me … Hypnotic and glowing.”
—Gregory Maguire, The New York Times Book Review
“The way I feel about Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot is how one of its characters describes meeting his wife: ‘We fell in love in a bloody way, thorns and hooks.’”
—Daniel Johnson, The Paris Review (Staff Pick)
“The historical and the fantastical entwine like snakes … There’s a rare pleasure in this blend of romance and phantoms.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Gripping … ‘History holds up one side of our lives and fiction the other,’ one character tells Cora, and the novel’s pleasures lie in the intersections between the two.”
—The New Yorker
“At once an intriguing mystery with clues, suspense, enigmas galore, and an exhilarating, witty, poignant paean to the unexplainable, the unsolvable, the irreducibly mysterious.”
—Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe
“A wild ride. If you’re all about magical realists like Kelly Link, this is one title you’ll need to pick up, because Samantha Hunt’s third novel takes the banal and rockets it into the fantastic (and the fantastically wonderful).”
—Bustle
“A riveting, linguistically playful tale about demons (real or imagined), loss, magic and motherhood.”
—Zoë Apostolides, Financial Times
“An American Gothic fever dream … Hunt’s packed prose writhes with hallucinatory detail. At her best, she lurches from lyricism to cynicism in short, declarative sentences.”
—Amy Gentry, Chicago Tribune
“Hunt maintains a dark and disturbing atmosphere throughout this intriguing, well-drawn gothic.”
—Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald
“Ethereal … This spellbinder is storytelling at its best.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A truly fantastic novel in which the blurring of natural and supernatural creates a stirring, visceral conclusion.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Samantha Hunt’s new book is a revelation. It’s emotionally precise, brilliantly imagined and flat-out spooky. A gothic novel that somehow manages to feel thrillingly contemporary and wholly original.”
—Jenny Offill
“I’m speechless. Mr. Splitfoot is so inventive, so new; I haven’t read anything like it in years … It’s a thrilling page-turner. I couldn’t stop reading it.”
—Gary Shteyngart
“Mr. Splitfoot is lyrical, echoing, deeply strange, with a quality of sustained hallucination. It is the best book on communicating with the dead since William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, but it swaps out that novel’s cynicism for a more life-affirming sense of uncertainty.”
—Luc Sante
“Absolutely thrilling … Hunt gives us plenty of humor amid the horror and awe—and then turns on the lights and shows us what was looming above us the whole time. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
—Sarah Manguso
The Invention of Everything Else
Winner, Bard Fiction Prize
Finalist for the Orange Prize
Long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 2010
A Washington Post Best Book of 2008
“Dazzling.”
—Elissa Schappel, Vanity Fair
“A sophisticated pastiche of science fiction, fantasy, melodrama, and historical anecdote … It all adds up to a precocious math of human marvel.”
—Elle
“Glorious … Daring and delicious, perfectly calibrated, fresh but not raw, original but neither off-putting nor disconcertingly strange.”
—Beth Kephart, Chicago Tribune
The Seas
National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award
“One of the most distinctive and unforgettable voices I’ve read in years. This book will linger … in your head for a good long time.”
—Dave Eggers
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Samantha Hunt is the author of three novels: Mr. Splitfoot, The Invention of Everything Else, and The Seas. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications. She lives in upstate New York. . You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
The Story Of
All Hands
Beast
The Yellow
Cortés the Killer
The House Began to Pitch
Love Machine
A Love Story
Wampum
The Story of Of
Acknowledgments
Also by Samantha Hunt
Praise for Samantha Hunt
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2017 by Samantha Hunt
All rights reserved
First edition, 2017
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hunt, Samantha, author.
Title: The dark dark: stories / Samantha Hunt.
Description: First edition. | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016050909 | ISBN 9780374282134 (paperback) | ISBN 9780374716523 (e-book)
Subjects: BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Short Stories (single author).
Classification: LCC PS3608.U585 A6 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050909
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