Review by Mark Sampson

For me, the mark of a good short story is always whether the author can, after 15 or 20 pages, arrive at a moment of pathos without having one or more of her characters burst into tears. By this standard, at least a couple of pieces in Hannah Holborn’s debut collection Fierce fail spectacularly. (Especially if I’m allowed to count metaphoric tears – snowflakes landing on cheeks and all that.) This isn’t to say that Holborn is a poor writer; she isn’t for the most part. But she has a tendency to undermine her strongest efforts with a cringe-worthy sentimentalism – slapped on thick and left to ooze from the page, like honey.

In Fierce, Holborn riffs off a kind of Atwoodian "survival": these stories are set in the wilds of British Columbia and the Yukon, and yet her characters aren’t driven by a desire to carve a place for their identities in the proverbial wilderness. Rather, her characters fight for survival after the loss of pivotal loved ones – either by abandonment or death – and find themselves forced to rely on the deeply flawed people and imperfect situations that remain. As a thematic string to lace these stories together, it’s a relatively brilliant one. Holborn takes great care in showing how losing vital people in our lives can set terrible things in motion, lead us to poor choices and flimsy excuses when things go wrong. She presents a motley ensemble of freaks and drunks, sluts and ne’er-do-wells; and yet the tension always comes from our sense that the protagonists’ situations would be just a bit less unbearable if they hadn’t lost that all-important person.

The strongest tale in this collection is the first one, "We Were Scenes of Grief". Penny Dryden has lost her immediate family in a plane crash. In her grief, she struggles to hold down her beloved job at Pesky’s Fish and Amphibian World as well as take care of her demented grandmother who thinks she’s a bird. With dyed blue hair and elaborate piercings, Penny is a punk girl on the verge of drowning in her loss. Yet she will not succumb to the easy way out. In the most powerful scene in the story, she takes the compensation cheque that she received from the airline (implausibly named "OccidentAir" – is this meant to be a play on WestJet, or perhaps the word "accident"?) to a park during a rain storm, folds into the shape of a raft, and sets it off to sink under the spreading waters of a puddle near the merry-go-rounds. It’s a poignant moment, one that illuminates Holborn’s imagery of water, of drowning, and of fighting for your own way back to the pool’s edge.

The weakest story in the collection is "Fierce of the Fierce". This ludicrous tale has an elderly female gold panhandler suffering from cabin fever and seeing the ghost of her annoying and deceased younger sibling Treeny. The ghost’s appearances and disappearances reek of a Hollywood movie rather than a genuine hallucination: "Treeny left slowly this time, from the feet up." I never believed for an instant in these characters or the situations in which they found themselves.

In terms of her style, Holborn is capable of rich, lively descriptions that do glorious things for the mind’s eye, and she has a fantastic ear for dialogue. Still, there are numerous passages that are undone by jarring clichés. From "We Were Scenes of Grief": "It took me twenty minutes to reach Jersey Park, three blocks away, and by then every part of me not protected by my slicker was soaked to the bone." From "Sedna": "Once she found a leather wallet with an out-of-service number on a scrap of paper. That and a Calgary Flames jersey, a black lace G-string, a sodden jack of clubs, mammal bones, and more used condoms than she could shake a stick at."

I was intrigued and ultimately baffled to see a praiseful blurb on the back cover of Fierce from Lisa Moore, author of the brilliant short story collection Open. In my more cynical moments reading Fierce, Hannah Holborn struck me as part of a recent sorority of Lisa Moore wannabes cropping up on the short fiction market (Dede Crane being another who comes to mind): writers wishing to explore the lush, teeming aquariums that are women’s emotional and sexual lives, while possessing only a fraction of Moore’s literary grit and originality.

Still, I see much hope in this writer. Other reviewers have panned the novella, "River Rising", at the collection’s end, but I think this is where Holborn shines. When she’s unencumbered by the short story form and her need to achieve a sappy moment of catharsis at the end, when she gives herself the space to explore her characters and how their lives intersect in meaningful ways, she shows the potential of being a sharp new voice in Canadian writing. I’d be very willing to read a full-length novel by this author in the future.

Mark Sampson has published one novel, Off Book (Norwood Publishing, 2007) and a smattering of short stories and poems. He’ll be going back to double check that none of his short stories end with somebody weeping.