Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.
Kaaron Warren’s moving novella Into Bones Like Oil is about the ghosts, both literal and figurative, that haunt us. The characters and the setting are equally haunted by the sins of their pasts, and in some cases their present actions as well.
Every person who enters the Angelsea rooming hours is broken in some way. Dora, the main character, cannot sleep because of guilt over the death of her daughters; Luke has PTSD from his military service; a resident called the Doctor almost seems to regret the crimes he committed against his patients. Property manager Roy is obsessed with learning the secrets possessed by the ghosts of a nearby shipwreck, to the point he is willing to abuse his tenants to get what he wants. While there are a few disreputable and thoroughly unlikeable characters in the boo, Roy is the worst – but also the only one not willing to admit that he has done – scratch that, is doing – something reprehensible.
Warren’s language is elegiac, wistful and dream-like. The whole story is permeated with a sense of loss, regret, decay, of being stuck in a limbo created by an individual’s choices despite where else they may wish to place the blame. There are some truly uncomfortable moments as different characters’ faults and failures come to the fore – but they are all necessary for the characters, and the reader, to find catharsis. This is most especially true for Dora, who needs to process her own culpability in her daughters’ deaths and also in the current goings-on at the Angelsea. Dora, Luke, and several other residents are on a path of possible redemption, but each must make their own choices regarding how or whether to pursue it.
Warren beautifully illustrates how guilt immobilizes some and motivates others while also asking whether forgiveness can ever truly come from outside if it doesn’t begin within.