In Doctor Faustus, Mephistophilis offers the hero a hell of deal: twenty-four years of fortune, followed perhaps by some minor burning. The temptation, which plays on the common reflex of “take now, worry later,” is an inversion of narrative: for Faustus, who knows how the story will end, the real excitement is in getting there. What matters is narration—the telling, rather than the told. Even so, there are no guarantees. “The Faustian tale,” James Wood wrote in The New Yorker (August 5, 2024), “is always a diabolically theological one, an orthodox tale with doubt, risk, and disobedience at the center.” Doubt, risk, and disobedience: a contemporary reader could be forgiven for falling prey to the allure of such rewards, given their meagreness in our righteous literary Eden. Perhaps that accounts for the freshness and vibrancy that suffuse Rebecca Fishow’s devilish new collection, How To Love A Black Hole.

Fishow’s stories bear hallmarks of contemporary fiction: clean, clear prose, modern characters grappling with the pressing accruement of everyday life, first-person present tense, and direct address. But what sets How To Love A Black Hole apart is the sheer strangeness at the heart of most of its stories. Toeing the line between the truly speculative and the merely strange, Fishow fearlessly invokes the odd, the unusual, the paranormal, and the bizarre in the service of her compositional goals. From an excess of ears and a case of rogue suspended animation to loquacious tornados and threnodic Santas, Fishow guides the reader through a myriad of off-center worlds that cohere through sheer instance: each story posits itself qua itself, leaving no room for doubt.

As with Fishow’s previous collection, The Trouble With Language (reviewed here), the brevity of her stories, which rarely extend beyond a few pages, works in their favor. This brevity gives neither writer nor reader the time to elaborate or disbelieve the supernatural tapestry of the fictive world.

Inaugurating the collection’s surreality, “Dr. Ear,” like so many of others in this collection, seems to operate on the assumption, indeed conviction, that the rules of its universe have already been established, well before the reader joins the action:

Are you kidding, of course I hid it from him, I mean, they say that you’re supposed to share everything with spouse—your menstrual cramps, body count, passwords—but put yourself in my shoes: what would you do, waking with a fleshy, rippled, lump on your lower back that looks like an ear but must be a tumor, so you do, you show your man, of course you do […]

Thus the book begins. This maneuver, world-building avant la lettre, is a skill which represents one of Fishow’s foremost strengths, second only perhaps to her comfort and aptitude in switching between narrational modes.

Five early stories—“Miles,” “Haunts,” “Forever Overhead,” “Open Up,” “Go Back”—showcase Fishow’s ability to range between an impressive series of points of view, to kaleidoscopic effect. Momentum builds as the reader is kept on a propulsive edge of discomfort and intrigue. In this way, too, How To Love A Black Hole articulates what it wishes to say: the strangeness of each piece spotlights the thematic concerns of the book writ large, pulling the domestic, the intimate, and the personal into an eerie yet illuminating light.

“Open Up,” a story of a contemplative woman considering her life mid-coitus, is certainly the funniest, possibly the strongest, of the collection, and a scintillating story with an ironic juxtaposition of Joycean proportion. Two paragraphs towards the close of the story highlight the whiplash contrast that Fishow achieves both inter- and intra-textually:

When the relationship ended between Darcy and her ex, she knew she had broken his heart. ‘I love you! I love you! I love you!’ he said like he was desperate to convince them both. Darcy could tell that he finally understood what was true from the beginning: she wouldn’t be able to recognize love if it was screwing her in the ass.

He spares Darcy’s back this time and orgasms into the sand. He makes a college try of eking an orgasm out of her, but it’s useless, and she doesn’t try to fake it. They sit and hold hands for a couple of minutes, but there’s nothing much to say. They know how all this is going to end. Up the hill, inside the mansion, her great aunt is probably sleeping, and Darcy feels guilty about everything she is.

In short, the book is not afraid of much, be it in composition or content. Even those wayward souls who admire the second person have a ripe apple in the title piece, in which a wife transforms, Mephistophilis-like, into a black hole, producing a vacuum and lines of swift, cutting prose: “Remember that invisibility it not absence. Feel for her everywhere,” we are told (or think, or inexplicably understand). “Be calm but mindful and vigilant of the fact that in the end, she’s mostly consuming herself.”

The Proustian depth of “The Shamash,” mediating with arresting poignancy on the last meal of a death-row inmate, is another contender for the collection’s best single work, one that deftly shows the book’s range. For all the enjoyment to be derived from Fishow’s off-beat surrealism, there is serious emotional depth on offer as well, and when she wants to, Fishow can play it straight, with impressive results. In the end it is narration that propels How To Love A Black Hole—transforming, transformative, and well worth the bargain.

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Rebecca Fishow’s story collection, The Trouble With Language (Trnsfr Books, 2020), won the 2019 Holland Prize for Fiction. Her chapbook, The Opposite of Entropy, was published in 2018 by Proper Tales Press. Her work has appeared in Quarterly West, Tin House, Joyland, The Believer, Logger, Smokelong Quarterly, Hobart, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University and is pursuing a PhD in literature and writing from The University of Illinois Chicago. She lives in Chicago with her husband, the linguist, Dan Goodhue.

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D. W. White writes consciousness-forward fiction and criticism. He serves as Founding Editor of L’Esprit Literary Review, Prose Editor for West Trade Review, and Executive Editor and Director of Prose for Iron Oak Editions. His writing appears in 3:AM, The Florida Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among others. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he teaches workshop along with classes on Modernism, Rachel Cusk, and the Self.