Green Fuse Burning - Tiffany Morris
This was recommended to me on Bluesky when I asked for novellas to read at the end of last year, and I've finally got around to picking it up. Stelliform Press is a Canadian small press focusing on SFFH and literary fiction "which takes up the conversation around the climate emergency and an intersectional view of environmental justice". Their submission guidelines also explicitly call out "quiet horror" as one of the things they aim to publish. All of these things appeal to me, so i was excited to crack this open. Here's the blurb:
After the death of her estranged father, artist Rita struggles with grief and regret. There was so much she wanted to ask him—about his childhood, their family, and the Mi’kmaq language and culture from which Rita feels disconnected. But when Rita’s girlfriend Molly forges an artist’s residency application on her behalf, winning Rita a week to paint at an isolated cabin, Rita is both furious and intrigued. The residency is located where her father grew up.
On the first night at the cabin, Rita wakes to strange sounds. Was that a body being dragged through the woods? When she questions the locals about the cabin’s history, they are suspicious and unhelpful. Ignoring her unease, Rita gives in to dark visions that emanate from the forest’s lake and the surrounding swamp. She feels its pull, channelling that energy into art like she’s never painted before. But the uncanny visions become more insistent, more intrusive, and Rita discovers that in the swamp’s decay the end of one life is sometimes the beginning of another.
I enjoyed this a lo, though at times I found myself wishing it had a little more meat on the bones. It's undeniably well written; the landscape comes alive on the page, and the juxtaposition of Rita's paintings as described by the gallery exhibiting them and the events surrounding their creation works brilliantly.
I'm a big fan of introspective horror, and Rita's time spent in solitude as she grapples with grief and strained relationships - with her dead father, with her dying romantic partnership, with the loss of her mother tongue, with her heritage, with the land itself - are great, and contain some really powerful writing. But the final act takes a hard turn into creature feature territory, and when I hit that section I initially wished that the earlier parts of the book had leaned into it a bit harder - that the quiet horror had been a little less quiet and creeping and a little louder, I suppose. Now that I've had some time to digest it, though, I think that desire was misplaced. The narrative builds slowly and inevitably towards its close, and the fact that all the signs pointing at the ultimate end point can be so easily dismissed/ignored by the reader until they're thrust into our faces mirrors directly the message of climate catastrophe that the book and Stelliform Press itself is concerned with.
The real horror here is in the afterword, as the author talks about the issues of climate grief and climate catastrophe that sparked the novella in the first place. Eco-horror is scary not because of what's on the page but because it reflects a reality we're living in, and no swamp-dwelling lichen monster can get close to that.
Green Fuse Burning is available from Stelliform Press.