Jason Heroux

Absurdities abound in Survivors of the Hive, a collection of four unbridled fictions by Kingston author Jason Heroux (The Amusement Park of Constant Sorrow, etc.). These are surreal tales of people adrift in a world without boundaries, where meaning is fluid, where the past bleeds into the present, where veracity has skipped a beat and no longer seems tethered to a reality we can recognize. In “Tell Me Again How the Silence in the Chamber of Exaltation Sounds,” a man is left scratching his head when he receives a phone call from his son Oscar, who has quit his job in a restaurant to become a private detective. Oscar is excited. He’s been hired by “a guy named Mr. Gallo,” to “find some ancient silence that went missing.” “The No Problem” tells of Shiela, who is traveling to a “town up north,” bringing her expertise as a “comparative philologist specializing in historical linguistics” to a place where people have begun responding “no” to common requests, bringing life and commerce to a near standstill. In “Tango Zero Hour,” homeowners Ethan and Fiona are facing a centipede infestation. But when the exterminator (“Mr. Ex”) arrives, he turns out to be an unqualified eccentric whose strategy for ridding the house of centipedes is not only reckless but toxic. And “The Last Poetry Contest” seems to take place in an apocalyptic dreamscape where the results of a high school poetry competition that the narrator is called upon to judge has less to do with talent and everything to do with talking strings. Heroux’s fictions constantly surprise and occasionally confound. Again and again, he propels his narratives down a rabbit hole of non-sequiturs where we encounter hellish environments and unsolvable conundrums. Logic plays little role in the actions of Heroux’s characters. On page after page, we witness people behaving against their own best interests, glibly making life-altering decisions on the flimsiest of pretexts. Survivors of the Hive gleefully thumbs its nose at narrative convention and will likely not appeal to readers who like their fiction to follow a straight and narrow line. Unapologetically over the top, its excesses are deliberate and its storylines thoroughly loony. But it’s also fearless, endlessly inventive, and a helluva lot of fun.… (mehr)