Chemical Valley

April 15, 2022
A collection of short fiction taps into eco-compromised lives in southern Ontario. As one character observes in Huebert's volume, Canada is a country built on oil. The tension between resource extraction and environmental collapse--both out in the world and inside the home--is ever present in this linked cycle of 11 stories. An oil refinery worker--who ponders the increasing number of dead birds as well as his mother's recent demise--starts thinking about how he'd like to be buried. A high school girl enters into an inappropriate relationship with her English teacher, though it's as much about the older woman's knowledge of plants as it is about anything sexual. The mother of a baby feels her life unravel as she tries desperately to rid her home of a mouse infestation. "The thing about rodents," the exterminator tells the horrified woman, whose husband works at one of the many local plants, "is that they're a lot like oil...Just like how there's pipelines all around you but you never see them....Same thing with the rodents." Oil is a recurring image, but it's not just a metaphor: The black blood of these tales is squeezed from the remains of plants, animals, and human beings alike. Huebert has a razor-sharp wit and an exacting eye for human foibles, as here where he describes one character's eco-conscious--yet decidedly not self-aware--love interest: "Daddy Issues doesn't use social media, refuses to milk data from his flesh. He wears plaid and vegan Blundstones, grooms his beard with fine-toothed sandalwood. He has two long dimples above his pouting buttocks, likes to joke that his rear end is luscious with negative capability." The stories are often on the longer side, and they pack a novelistic level of detail. The author manages to offer intimate portraits of human lives without ever letting readers forget the climate bubbling just outside their windows. Huebert's assortment of activists, hockey players, preppers, and nurses find themselves on the front lines of crises in which every choice has a moral dimension--and readers will be right there with them. A masterful assemblage of environmentally minded tales.

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