Static Disruption

by Sara Dobbie

A collection of five linked stories occuring during a power failure. The inhabitants of Chelsea Street experience a strange and unsettling night, never realizing how connected they truly are.

38 pages, Paperback

Published July 24, 2022

About the author

Sara Dobbie is a Canadian writer from Southern Ontario. Her stories have appeared in Fictive Dream, JMWW, Sage Cigarettes, New World Writing, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Ruminate Online, Trampset, Ellipsis Zine, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, The Pushcart Prize, and she is on the Wigleaf Top 50 longlist for 2021 and 2022. Her chapbook "Static Disruption" is available from Alien Buddha Press. Her collection "Flight Instinct" is available from ELJ Editions. Follow her on Twitter @sbdobbie, and on Instagram at @sbdobwrites.

Reviews

[Holly Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Static Disruption by Sara Dobbie places the reader firmly on Chelsea Street in the middle of a power outage. Her descriptions are so well rendered that we also shiver from the cold and our own pulse quickens with each crack and boom of a fallen, ice-covered branch. We’re given voyeuristic, intimate glimpses into the interwoven lives of the residents of Chelsea Street. In “The End”, an old man exhales as he reflects on his life, calmly prepared for whatever happens next. With “Love in the Void”, a woman embraces solitude, until the glimmer of companionship with a fellow creative soul draws her in. There is the weight of moving on, but somehow still stuck with the ghosts of the past in “Shades of Home.” The story that resonated the most with me personally was “Taking Control.” I know what it’s like to decide that you want more, that you deserve better than the things you’ve settled for. The weight sliding off the woman’s shoulders as she leaves is directly contrasted with the heavy burden the trees are under, cracking and falling all around her. In “A Séance”, we’re shown life unsupervised, ready and willing to make the misguided mistakes of youth. We start at the end and end at the start, with the in-between filled by the authentic complexities of the human experience.

[Mandira Pattnaik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sara Dobbie's "Static Disruption" is charmingly true to its title. The five inter-connected flash stories build a world in a few hundred words in a prose style that is masterful and confident. The reader is drawn into the narrative and the conflicts of the characters, and made a silent but attentive spectator to their affairs, both past and present. The opening story deftly allows the reader an introduction of the relationships between Mr. Bishop, and the others, including Edna, Frankie, Joe, Adeilade, Leigh and Eleanor. The second is a particularly well-etched flash, where the calm, organized prose peeps into Mitzi's life as she captures a self-portrait for Belinda in Prague. Dobbie's signature style warms the heart as she places Tara in the middle for the third story, "Taking Control". The final two stories establish Dobbie's expertise in handling difficult situations with ease, alternating between immediacy and empathy for the characters. The richness of imagery which Dobbie puts on paper, describing the snow, the storm, and the neighborhood, mesmerise the reader. Flawless precision in the descriptions is something few other contemporary narrators manage, like this sentence: 'Moon beams shine down on ice laden trees, their arm arching and bending like ballerinas.' For people who love flash fiction and novellas-in-flash, "Static disruption" is a must-read.

[Debbie Robson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t know how Sara Dobbie weaves her magic but within a few words she can create a character with a recognisable personality moving in a distinct world. And this is so much harder to do in short fiction. Through five very disparate points of view we encounter these characters who live in the same street, Chelsea Street, during a violent, unseasonal storm.
In the first story The End Mr Bishop finds himself in a difficult situation and wonders who he can call for help. He ponders on his neighbour. “Just an hour ago he’d seen her out on the sidewalk setting up a tripod and a camera. Posing in front of it wearing sandals in the wet snow right after the power went out. He wouldn’t trust her to help him any more than an escaped convict.”
In the second story, Love in the Void, we step straight into Mitzi’s world. “Mitzi lives here alone, though her mother hounds her to get a roommate. She savours the solitude, it allows her to breathe, to create. And what roommate would be ok with a shared living area filled with enormous half-finished canvases and empty paint cans, fabric swatches and scraps of found metal piled in the corners?” It is only with surprise we realise the nature of her connection with Mr Bishop.
In Taking Control we meet Tara another resident of Chelsea Street who is having marital problems and has just received a text. “Tara reads the text, cringes, and returns her phone to her purse without replying. The rain is apparently the freezing kind, which means the boss is sending everyone home early.” And with one paragraph we are a world away from Mitzi.
In Shades of Home Leigh returns to her childhood home and with a deft touch Dobbie brings Leigh’s childhood and all that she lost, briefly alive again.
In the last story, Séance, Faith is sick of being treated like a kid and is very interested in impressing her brother Noah’s friend Adam. During the séance the threads of the stories overlap like the storm itself, with a beginning and an end, bringing these five flash pieces to a satisfying conclusion. Masterly and highly recommended.

[Emily Butler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Static Disruption is a highly satisfying, interwoven connection of bite-sized short stories. Dobbie takes readers on a journey through various homes of a single street during a snowstorm and power outage, connecting otherwise disconnected strangers. The tension in this collection is masterful and succinct. Dobbie packs an impressive number of thematic ideas into the short space of this book. I recommend it to fans of flash fiction. My favorite story of the bunch, “Love in the Void,” struck me with its honest exploration of modern day loneliness.

[Sam Szanto · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of linked stories occurring during a power failure in October, Sara Dobbie's novella-in-flash is a masterclass in how to say a lot in a few pages (37 in total). In the Hemingway style, the reader feels more than they understand, and the stories are no less rich for that.

Dobbie's prose is silverfish-quick, creating fresh tension on every page, while being full of heart and beautifully observed detail. She deals with sadness, loss, isolation and grief, with the idea of the characters facing their ghosts literalised in the final story, 'Seance'. The reader will care about every character as soon as they meet them, feeling they have known them for a lot longer than they have. 'Taking Control' is the stand-out story of the collection, with the protagonist Tara finally admitting to her husband that she cannot have a baby with him; a situation that will resonate with not only women but men too.

Sara Dobbie's is a unique talent, and this is a jewel of a book. I look forward to her next work immensely.

[Stephanie Parent · Rating 5 out of 5]

This stunning novella takes place on one street, during one October storm, and illuminates both the hidden connections and sometimes insurmountable differences between the residents and visitors to this street. Even though this book is short, Dobbie uses precise details and evocative language to make us feel like we know the characters right away. I'm not sure how she creates three-dimensional, unique characters in such few words, but she really does! I especially loved how details in later stories would shed new light on things in previous stories, and how we got to see characters both from inside their own heads and from the perspectives of those around them. I appreciated that Dobbie didn't go for the neat, easy ending that would tie everything together, but instead left the story more open-ended, unsettling and open to interpretation, just like life.

Sara Dobbie has a unique style that I love to read, and I highly recommend this book!

[Shome Dasgupta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Provided Blurb:

In Sara Dobbie’s collection of linked stories—Static Disruption—a snowstorm settles in, causing a power outage—stirring gentle havocs on Chelsea Street—where in the darkness, fallen limbs can be trees or neighbors or memories or lost desires, and we find connections among the disconnected. There is no electricity, from house to house in Static Disruption and amid this gloomy day in October, a luster of troubled and haunted lives reveals a chilling disturbance which solidifies the cracking ice that streaks through each story. Dobbie writes and dazzles and dances with a current that strings us all together as we search for meaning and solace in a world full of snow—a blizzard in the clearing.