Chemical Valley

by David Huebert

From city-dwelling preppers to long term care nurses, dishwashers to professional hockey enforcers to refinery workers, Chemical Valley’s caring and carefully-wrought stories cultivate rich human emotional worlds in all the dankness of our bio-chemical animacy. Full-hearted, laced throughout with bruised optimism and a sincere appreciation of the profound beauty of our wilted, wheezing world, Chemical Valley does not shy away from urgent modern questions―the distribution of toxicity, environmental racism, the future of technology, the climate, and the human body―but it grounds these anxieties in vivid and often humorous intricacies of its characters’ lives. These are stories about big questions, but they are not scared of sentiment. Swamp-wrought, they run wild with vital energy, tilt and teeter into crazed and delirious loves.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Canada, Nature

224 pages, Paperback

First published October 19, 2021

About the author

David Huebert is a Canadian writer of fiction, poetry, and critical prose whose work has won the CBC Short Story Prize, the Sheldon Currie Fiction Prize, and the Walrus Poetry Prize, among other awards. His debut short fiction collection, Peninsula Sinking (Biblioasis 2017) won the Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award, was runner up for the Danuta Gleed Award, and was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Halifax author David Huebert’s fiction explores various ways in which we make ourselves sick by first inflicting damage on the environment. Our habitat.

There’s the obvious cancer, and infertility, and the less obvious twisting of the mind, taking forms like violence and survivalist planning for the apocalypse–a psychosis that almost seems reasonable given our possible futures.

Read my full review at https://atlanticbooks.ca/stories/chri...

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intriguing stores from my home town of Sarnia, Ontario. Huebert gets the essence of a city built on resource extraction, pollution and toxic (figuratively and literally) work environments. I’m third generation chemical valley. My grandfather, Imperial Oil lifer, used to say, “that’s the smell of money” just like Huebert’s fictional characters. My father died of cancer, as did my grandfather, but don’t worry, it had nothing to do with working in Chemical Valley. But I’ve broken the chain, my kids have moved away…Read this book for a glimpse of the high personal cost of cheap gasoline and throw away plastics. In the 5 plus years since most of these short stories were written, it has gotten worse.

[Enid Wray · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dark, disturbing, damning collection of stories, deeply critical of the times we live in and the history that brought us to this moment in time… this moment of social and environmental reckoning.

Huebert castigates each and every one of us for our complicity… If reading this collection doesn’t inspire us to act - now, individually and collectively, while there is still a chance - then, well… I hate to say that there is no hope - because there must always be hope - but……..

A clarion call.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The world of David Huebert’s second collection of short fiction, Chemical Valley, is a poisonous, inhospitable place. In some respects, as we turn these pages, it’s easy to imagine we’re visiting a future world: the one that awaits our elder selves and our descendants should humans continue to obliterate CO2-absorbing flora and allow toxic effluents and emissions to pour unchecked into the land, sea and air. One might assume that the author intends these tales of struggle and longing in a tarnished landscape to be cautionary: prognostications of environmental cataclysm, annihilation at our own hands. But as we read, what David Huebert is really telling us becomes clear: this is the world in which we currently reside, and the confusion and desperation his characters experience as contaminants seep unseen into the earth and the biological slowly succumbs to the chemical is everyone’s here and now. This is serious business. But though the messaging is palpable, there is nothing heavy-handed in his approach: no doomsday declaration, no portentous drumbeat. In Chemical Valley, as in his previous volume of stories, Peninsula Sinking, David Huebert’s knack for creating engaging characters and finding interesting things for them to say, do and think is on abundant, boisterous display. Huebert’s characters are Every-man and -woman, people whose daily rituals, quandaries and tribulations mirror our own. The narrator of the title story, set in Sarnia—hub of Canada’s petrochemical industry and nicknamed “Chemical Valley”—works at a processing plant. His partner, Eileen, is off work, suffering from a mysterious, debilitating malady. With the indifference of his employer as a backdrop, we witness him floundering under domestic and professional pressures while grappling with manifestations of community contamination, so widespread they have infiltrated his home. “Swamp Thing” tells the story of teenage Sapphire. Bouncing between her separated parents, embroiled in a clandestine affair with her female English teacher, Sapphire and her friends Dee Dee and Jenna are members of the ultra-climate-change-conscious generation meeting the disastrous consequences of the previous generation’s environmental profligacy head on. The story, set during a punishing heatwave, chronicles Sapphire’s emotional awakening through a series of catastrophic climate/environmental incidents, culminating in “a super-flare, a major melt-down, and a death at the plant.” Elsewhere in the book we encounter Deepa, a young mother barely coping with a recalcitrant newborn, a complacent husband and a rodent infestation (“Cruelty”), a reluctant hockey enforcer whose personal life is a mess (“Six Six Two Fifty”), Zane, whose partner Geoff is obsessively preparing for the coming environmental apocalypse (“SHTF”), and fifty-year-old socially-challenged Edward, bullied all his life, afflicted with a maddening fungal skin infection, whose man-made companion (the GenuFlesh XS-4000, “a fully customizable” “anthropomorphic robobride”), named Lily, is just about done for, worn out by his constant need (“The Pit”). Throughout the book, Huebert’s prose shines, frequently catching the reader off guard with startling but memorable turns of phrase and delirious imaginative leaps. And while the manic energy, eccentric humour and wry observations on life and love keep us entertained, the book’s rich emotional core draws us in, touching us at the most profound level.

David Huebert writes in a pulsating, kinetic contemporary voice. Still at an early point in his career, he has complete command of his craft. These quirky, artfully composed stories are a gift worth savouring.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It’s only poison”

Rot and decay. The slow slipping of a world into numerous apocalypse, run on incomprehensible sludge. Our lifeblood.

My favourite stories were definitely in the second half. These felt more tangible and Real.
If the first half is Rot, the second half is Ruin.
My favourites would have to be Chemical Valley, Cruelty, The Pit, and Dream Haven.

The stories in this book gave me insight into the question, “In the face of never-ending crisis, a dying world, and personal ruin, how do we continue?”
I don’t think the question is answered, but it does paint a picture of toxic smog, human desire, and smelt. How all three are more interconnected than we’d care to admit.

What I know is that as many of these stories came to an end, the characters became familiar and I wanted for more.

[Adrienne · Rating 1 out of 5]

I actually had to give it up. I do like to read a book that uses sentences that make some semblance of sense. Grammar, and structure mean something to me. The whole thing was a mish mash of whatever .... I don't know... It is all over the place. Drivel. Tiresome repeats of some event or other, if you could call it an event.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark and painfully relevant. I am reminded that powerful fiction can have so much more critical impact than the 24 hour news cycle or the mass confusion of social media’s information/misinformation fire hose feed.

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was sent this book for free in return for my honest review by BUneke Magazine. See the published review in the next issue.

[Marianne Ward]

Note to myself: Finished first three stories before having to return the library loan on May 6, 2022

[Irina Babamova · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Kim Conklin]

Beautifully crafted short stories that seem almost futuristic, although they depict our contemporary reality in all of its strangeness and absurd contradictions.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written and heart wrenching. I am not one for short stories but each chapter captivated me and held me through the end. 10/10 no notes

[Penn Kemp · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It’s only poison" but that poison seeps everywhere from the ground up, in these frightening, anxious stories out of Sarnia Ontario's all too well-named Chemical Valley. And that poison is oil; that poison is our ruined environment. This beautifully written book reads as futuristic but is utterly present. Beautifully produced by Biblioasis.