The Dark Dark

Among the most striking of the stories in this strange and surprising collection from Bard Prize winner Hunt is the opener, "The Story of," about a woman named Norma, newly unemployed and longing to be pregnant, who encounters another Norma, dirty and homeless and possibly the recently discovered half-sister of her husband. The closing story, "The story of of" is another version of the opener, in which the original is repeated, expanded, and modified several more times to dizzying effect. Like the Normas, many of the characters in these pieces are teetering on the edge of sanity. In "The Beast," after discovering a couple of ticks on her body, a woman imagines she turns into a deer when she goes to bed each night. In "Love Machine," an FBI agent sits in an unmarked van watching his comely, potentially lethal female robot pay a call on the Unabomber.