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Hello, Horse

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Taut, stylish stories take on big moral questions from surprising perspectives.

A teenager's job mucking stalls at a dog track takes a strange turn when his co-worker finds a new religion at odds with winning streaks. Two brothers set out in search of fame upon the frozen waters of a subarctic lake. After her mother's death, a high school student tries to make rent by winning the Unitarian Church's Annual Young Writer's Short Story Competition. An incarcerated man considers the nature of justice between shifts with his fellow inmates at Nations at War, the ultimate live-action experience for tourists eager to learn about the Canadian Civil War.

Spanning states and provinces, and featuring an apocalypse, a coterie of ghosts, nuns on ice, and an above-average number of dogs, the stories in Hello, Horse consider the mirage of authenticity and the impact of decisions we make—for better and for worse.

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    • Kirkus

      Starred review from July 1, 2024
      Eleven strange, sly stories by an intriguing Canadian writer. Kemick has published a volume of poetry (Caribou Run), an account of his stint in a Passion play (I Am Herod), and a stage production called Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical. The tales here mix whimsy, weirdness, lust, and Canadian politics, bringing to mind George Saunders and the slackers from Wayne's World. In "Gravity," two teenagers are paid to make insulting alterations to political campaign signs. The narrator ponders how he'll miss his life's "infinite simplicity" when his 16-year-old girlfriend has their baby. In the 50-page "Satellite," a convent school in a future world of constant fires and smoke has teens and nuns in full habit competing fiercely at ice hockey. In "Patron Saints," infidelity touches a gay couple in Paris, where an escaped tiger roams the streets; one of the men trades quips with a talking dog. At a Canadian teachers' conference in Cuba in "Sea Change," two attendees struggle to find the enthusiasm for adultery while pro-democracy protests turn into "state-sanctioned violence." In "Our Overland Offensive to the Sea," a Canadian colonel, "after an RV vacation to Gettysburg," decides to stage a mini civil war in Manitoba with live ammo and some troops dragooned from prison and introduced with their crimes, as in "Carl (Drugs)." Kemick writes with the detail and clarity of good journalism. The prevailing mode is irony, ranging from playful to grotesque, which forms a distancing frame for the author's sympathetic sketches of life's portions of pain, hope, or confusion. He has a penchant for alternating between things familiar and bizarre. The "simplicity" of the teens' life in "Gravity," for instance, includes a mother who "hung herself with a plugged-in strand of Christmas lights." Provocative, entertaining short fiction.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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Languages

  • English

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