Life Among the Terranauts

Kept losing focus even though the stories are short

The stories in Life Among the Terranauts by Caitlin Horrocks are filled with people puzzling over their lives in a world that holds more questions than answers; they don’t even know what questions to ask; they try to master the words themselves. They hold onto the past; they try to escape; they risk going into the unknown; they make a new start.

I lived in the aura of the first story, The Sleep, for days.

“Bounty was an assertion, an act of faith. It looked best when left unexamined.” ~from Life Among the Terranauts by Caitlin Horrocks
“Our children came home and told us that we were the suckers of the last century,” living in a town with no future and no prospects. Immigrants had come for the free land, and stayed out of pure persistence.

One winter the Rasmussen family decide to hibernate until spring. Soon other families also hibernate, saving money on food and heat, children happy not to stand in freezing weather for a school bus. The town becomes a media sensation. How to explain why they stayed, why they slept?

The story was unsettling, and yet, somehow comforting. The quotation from James Joyce’s The Dead stayed in my head as I thought of a world sleeping under an eternal, gentle snowfall.

In Norwegian for Troll, Annika returns to the remote Keweenaw Peninsula to aid her elderly mother and stays on after her death, stuck in her family’s past, until she remembers her immigrant ancestors had risked journeying into the future.

While Rose sorts her mother’s estate she wonders about her mother’s enigmatic relationship with her roommate, Bev.

A teacher realizes she can’t save every disturbed child who comes through her classroom.

A woman at a party decides to sleep with a man because he is going to jail.

Teenage girls looking for guaranteed happiness turn to Magic- 8 Balls and Ouija boards.

A divorced father helps his estranged son, wishing he had advice for living in an uncertain world.

An elderly woman knows she is in her last days. She pities the priest. “How endless, the secrets of other. How endless, the reassurance they need,”she thinks.

A woman loses everything on the Oregon Trail, except her own life.

A traveler abroad seeks answers to questions, dreaming of a new life before he is forced to return home.

The tour guide at Paradise Lodge promises to show the ‘real Peru,’ but all he has are stories to fill the hungry tourists. When he gives them the real thing, he discovers their inability to comprehend what they are seeing.

A woman realizes that her childhood memories are unreliable.

The last story, Life Among the Terranauts, is also about a retreat from the world, but is filled with sinister overtones. A group of volunteers are paid to live in a biodome. They had been chosen for their “fortitude, for pigheaded faith,” but 542 days in, with 188 to go, food is scarce and things are falling apart. One man has embraced this life, proclaiming they are a new society, a new start for humanity, calling himself Adam and the narrator Eve. It is chilling.

Fortitude and faith. It’s what we all need in this life.

The writing is fantastic, with sentences that stuck in my head:

Seed hulls scatter dark across the sinking snow, punctuation marks without words.

Growing up had been so far a great un-knowing, an erosion of the facts that had once seemed very clear and precious to her.
The silences that exist inside all stories.

There is no blade that mends, they sing. Only the thread going forward. Only our readiness for the cut.

I received an ARC in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Caitlin Horrocks is a gifted writer. She crafts elegant short stories. I like the fact that she isn’t married to a particular format or style. Some of her stories are first person, some third. Some are lengthy, others very short. It seems the won thing they have in common is an undercurrent of sadness. I felt sorry for the characters who often led aimless lives, trapped inside a box not of their making, with no exit in sight. That sadness often extended to the reader. her stories made me sad, though not in a bad way, if you can imagine something like that. I will read more of her work, and will recommend her to others.

Life Among the Terranauts is an unusual dive into the surreal worlds only Caitlin Horrocks could craft. I began reading this collection with no preconceived notions other than a recommendation from a friend who enjoyed it. Within the first page I was in awe of how beautifully Horrocks is able to compose her prose. She pulled me into outrageous worlds and helped me see them as if they were real, and maybe even happening down the street. Her writing is impressive, to say the least. And her storytelling is captivating. I could hardly put the collection down after reading the first story, The Sleep, with all of its absurd characters. I truly enjoyed this collection. Ive seen it described before as fun, and I wholeheartedly agree. This is an absolutely fun collection of stories. Well worth the read.

Caitlin Horrocks is the gold standard in short story writing. These stories are brilliance without any pretension. I feel smarter and better about the world after reading these stories.

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