Collective Gravities: Stories

by Chloe N. Clark

In Collective Gravities, something magical is always just beneath the surface — the zombie apocalypse happens, but the world stays relatively the same; a woman begins to feel the earth moving beneath her feet. In this fantastical, genre-bending collection, Chloe N. Clark launches readers from Iowa, to outer space, and back again. Lyrical, funny, and full of transcendent beauty, Collective Gravities is a cause for celebration: an astronomically gifted writer, who, in twenty-six stories, shows us an entire world (and beyond) full of heartbreak, hope, redemption, and wonder.

Genres: Short Stories, Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction Fantasy

240 pages

First published July 7, 2020

Reviews

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy hell, Collective Gravities gutted me. Just pulled all of my insides out. It's one of those collections where the first story hooks you so hard and you're rendered helpless, a willing victim to the words on the pages, pushed and pulled and dragged around like a fucking ragdoll, simultaneously ricocheted and riveted. If you're not reading this, what the fuck ARE you reading?!

[Jan Stinchcomb · Rating 5 out of 5]

A long awaited full length collection from Chloe Clark. These stories are dreamy and solid at once, full of characters learning the language of loss.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection of magical realist stories from Clark. Where I think most writers look to folklore or something from the natural world when they construct magical realist stuff, following Garcia Marquez's lead, Clark turns instead of science and science fiction, and it has this weird effect on her stories, shifting all of them into the slight future instead of the slight past. I dug it.

There are, as a review I read noted, a lot of overlaps here-- a lot of astronauts, a lot of disappearances-- and maybe there are a few too many stories here. I think the collection could be fifty pages shorter, but I'd be hard pressed to tell too many stories to hit the road. They are well-constructed-- Clark is adept at mixing flash backs with present action in ways that reveal just how skilled she is at telling a story, away even from the elements of the fantastic that populate her stories.

[Jonathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately these stories didn't do a ton for me—most of them did not stick with me, a lot of them did not have endings that felt conclusive, and some of the pieces weirdly felt like I was just reading the same story three or four times?

2/5

[Tara Whitehead · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning stories that will stay with you long after you finish them.

[lex · Rating 3 out of 5]

intriguing collection of short (and very! short) stories. Some were stronger and more fascinating than others, but overall a solid read.

[Hans · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent short story collection. I’m rereading it after a few years and I had forgotten a lot of the details but had remembered the feeling that I got at the end of a lot of these stories. It’s a soft sadness that the little world you’ve been in while reading it has ended and you have to move on to the next one.
I had also forgotten that a few of these are pretty creepy, though I wouldn’t say any of them get into horror territory, they’re more unsettling than anything else.
The writing in these stories is really good, and a lot of them have a bitter sweet mix of sadness and hope (or if not hope then at least a sense of peace or acceptance) that I just love.
I’m glad I read this again after a couple years, and I think it will become one I read again whenever I want to tap in to the feelings that it does so well to create.

[Ian]

Few people would have predicted a global pandemic would plunge the world into a collective isolation with the specter of death threatening at every moment. Yet Chloe N. Clark’s debut story collection, Collective Gravities, offers a prescient examination of these anxieties. Several of Clark’s stories even go as far as manifesting the sense that she somehow anticipated the current global health crisis. The stories largely share a common examination of characters enduring solitude, haunted by loneliness and facing threat of death, imminent and existential. Clark tells these stories with a fleeting sense of time, generating an urgency to their predicaments.

Full review at Trampset https://trampset.org/book-review-coll...

[Liza Olson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a truly stunning, imaginative, life-affirming collection of stories. Clark has a way of setting the micro of her characters' interiority--loneliness, love, heartbreak, against the macro of the unknown--living through a pandemic, working in space, encountering maybe-angels. Every single story in this collection hooked me, and each played perfectly into the next as well as the ones that came before. I especially loved seeing recurring narrative threads pop up in new and fascinating ways, challenging her characters to love more, to chart the particulars of their pain, and to keep walking into the dark, whatever the dark might be for them. These stories offer a refreshingly new take on magical realism, a kind of literary-scientific-magic, to the point where each one felt rooted in the tradition of what's come before but was taken in such a bold and new direction, a new sort of Clark realism. Through all of these glimpses into worlds that could be ours given a bit of a skew and some technological advancement, there's the heart of a humanist, a writer who can embody so many perspectives and find a way to point toward the universality of our condition. This is a wonderful, incredible collection. I can't wait to read what Clark does next.

[Sara]

loved, blurbed:

Chloe N. Clark is a writer of terrific imagination and insight into the human spirit, and her COLLECTIVE GRAVITIES shimmers with wonder and light. Her characters have one foot on the ground and one arm toward the sky, and their fearless reaching (for the moon, stars, other places, other worlds) transcends our notions of what is possible. These are expansive stories of resistance and hope, resonant with a resiliency we need now more than ever.  

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, tightly written stories. Every story here felt like it had a propulsive energy, even as many of them were more meditative or slower-paced. (This is not a great description, but all I want to get at is that I couldn’t stop reading.) particular standouts for me were;
* Lover, I’ll be waiting
* they are coming for you...
* like the desert dark
* for you, I am closer than the sky
* between the axis and the stars

[Once-a-librarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chloe Clark’s distinctive voice rings throughout the stories in “Collective Gravities.” From accidents in space to suffering sisters and dreaming with dogs, every story opens a window to a slice, to a beautiful view of the author’s imagination and craft.

[Walter Heape · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exceptional debut collection. These stories are tiny vignettes of loss and grief that manage to convey so much in their brevity. The economy of language that poets wield while writing fiction astounds me. Powerful.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very glad I saw this in a book roundup at the end of last year.

[Rachel McKenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection of short stories, especially because their variety was so broad! Space, zombies, algae, dog ownership--- yeah, it has pretty much everything. Lovely to take a story at a time or to read in a long sitting to feel the arc of the collective narratives.

[Juliette · Rating 5 out of 5]

*full review at Pencils & Pages*

I can say with quite a bit of confidence that Chloe N. Clark is one of my favorite contemporary authors. I’ve been following her on social media for a while, which first introduced me to her poems, stories, and essays. Then, I had the chance to review Your Strange Fortune a while back. So, unsurprisingly, I was thrilled to have the chance to read Collective Gravities and explore a whole new world—quite literally.

[Eric Stinton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this short story collection. I didn’t dislike any of the stories; in fact I found them breezily readable. However, I couldn’t say any of the stories stuck with me afterward, either. On top of that, there were at least a dozen obvious and somewhat jarring typos that made it into the final publication, which is an oddly high number. Overall I thought it was just OK, but your mileage may vary.