The opening of ‘First Fear’ seemed like it was leading up to a punch line, It started with It took a little longer for me to see that the apparent absurdity was a way of breaking through mundane ways of seeing things so as to focus on what those things mean and why we fear them. The tone was light and witty and the language was engaging, so it took a while to notice that the content had gone beyond eccentricity and into gruesome absurdity. Misled, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say ambushed, by the light-hearted language of the ‘First Fear’ story, I started to it read it aloud as sight-read to my wife. I’ve read the first section in ‘Part 1 The House’ which is called ‘Last One To Leave Please Turn Off The Lights’. From what I’ve seen so far, these parts aggregate our experience of different sources of fear or worry or regret.

The story collection is divided into three parts: The House, The Child, and The Past. Instead, she lets us know that we aren’t alone in our fears and this somehow makes them feel more manageable. She offered neither solutions nor judgements. Most of all, I’m hooked by her honesty in confronting the things we don’t talk about. I admire the boldness of her imagery, taking us into the absurdly exaggerated to help us bring the ordinary into focus.

I like her humour and how she uses it while talking about what we fear, not to lessen those fears, but to bind them to us, to get us to own them as part of our experience.

I love the intimacy she offers her readers, telling us the background to her writing as if we’ve known each other forever. I’ve only read the first few pages of Kirsty Logan’s short story collection, ‘Things We Say In The Dark” and I’m already hooked.

Kirsty logan things we say in the dark