Review of Black Light: stories by Kimberly King Parsons
New York: Vintage, Penguin Random House, 2019, 211 pages.
Parsons has created a searing collection of characters driven by an id-dominated, desperate pleasure just a slight change-of-expression away from deep realms of pain. Her characters are ravenous, capable of sucking the last bit of sustenance from the emptiest junk, and not above battening on the lives of others. In “Guts,” an aimless young woman tries to hold on to her tentative relationship with a medical student, living vicariously through her comically spotty understanding of what he does. Another character slowly, deliberately, steals her friend’s girlfriend in Glow Hunter.
The characters are generally left still hanging on at the end of the story, resisting abandonment, but there’s a trace of cockeyed hope that they can transform the junk they have fed on so furiously into a source of real power. The question is whether their perverse force will spend itself in the process or find a more worthy use. Will the women seeking validation and revenge through relationships with men of perceived power–the medical student, the philandering boss–be able to find the same wild energy in a more balanced relationship, or is the lack of balance itself the source of her energy?
Parsons makes good use of her bleak Texas setting. Half-wild children play recklessly, with a healthy contempt for the hapless adults in charge. In “Fiddlebacks,” a boy collects the most dangerous bugs he can find because they are the only life in the landscape, while his mother makes do with a man mangled in a car accident, the best she can find as well. In “Starlite,” a woman helps her cocaine-addicted, fuck-buddy boss transform a bleak motel room with a perfect playlist and coordinated body movements. “You could slip right out of your life,” she says, while snatching “frantic little handfuls of nothing from the air.” Could anything be more exhilarating than creating something from nothing?
Parsons has created characters with a fascinating dark energy. The reader is advised: follow at your own risk and at a safe distance.
