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Book: “Green Fuse Burning” by Tiffany Morris
Publishing Info: Stelliform Press, October 2023
Where Did I Get This Book: I received a copy from the publisher.
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: The debut novella from the Elgin Award winning author of Elegies of Rotting Stars. After the death of her estranged father, artist Rita struggles with grief and regret. There was so much she wanted to ask him-about his childhood, their family, and the Mi’kmaq language and culture from which Rita feels disconnected. But when Rita’s girlfriend Molly forges an artist’s residency application on her behalf, winning Rita a week to paint at an isolated cabin, Rita is both furious and intrigued. The residency is located where her father grew up. On the first night at the cabin, Rita wakes to strange sounds. Was that a body being dragged through the woods?
When she questions the locals about the cabin’s history, they are suspicious and unhelpful. Ignoring her unease, Rita gives in to dark visions that emanate from the forest’s lake and the surrounding swamp. She feels its pull, channelling that energy into art like she’s never painted before. But the uncanny visions become more insistent, more intrusive, and Rita discovers that in the swamp’s decay the end of one life is sometimes the beginning of another.
Review: Thank you to Stelliform Press and Beverly Bambury for sending me a print copy of this book!
The first thing about “Green Fuse Burning” by Tiffany Morris that caught my eye was the cover. When this showed up in my inbox with the cover attached to the email, I saw the cover and was just under its spell. The vivid colors, the creepy image, it just grabbed me. I also haven’t read much eco-horror, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to give it a go with this novella. I went in expecting one thing, but once I was done I realized that it completely upended all my expectations.
Horror wise, I thought that “Green Fuse Burning” had a lot of really well done imagery, and a lot of unique prose choices that make the macabre at times quite beautiful. This is a horror tale that anchors itself in nature and eco-horror, with references to climate change and an eerie and foreboding swamp that draws protagonist Rita into its spell while she tries to work on her art inside an isolated cabin on a lake that has ties to her now deceased Mi’kmaw father. From strange noises at night to standoffish people in town to images of a woman who seems to be made if fiery vegetation, the scares are both deeply unsettling as well as beautifully written (which isn’t TOO shocking as Morris is an award winning poet). The descriptions of the vegetation, the landscape, the gore, it is absolutely what I expect from horror while also being unexpectedly gorgeous. I also really enjoyed how each chapter opened with a description of the various art pieces that Rita creates while in the cabin, that gives the reader and idea of the escalating horror situations that are to come on her journey in the swamp.
But what I liked most about this book is the way that Morris examines grief and loss, and how that not only applies to losing loved ones, but also losing your connection to your heritage through that initial loss. Rita is an Indigenous woman who has a tenuous relationship with her Mi’kmaw heritage and culture, and when her main link, her estranged father, dies, she now feels adrift and as though a part of herself she never really knew has been taken from her with his death. Rita’s journey in the woods on the lake where he grew up has the expected ‘cabin the woods’ beats, but it goes deeper than that and dives into the horrors of this kind of grief. And I also liked how instead of grief being seen as something to be fought or overcome, as some horror stories have done, you get the sense that Rita’s grief isn’t something to be conquered, but something to be accepted and something to sit with. That, too, ties into the colonized nature of Rita’s grief, as within the Western lens (as seen through her white girlfriend Molly), Rita is sent away to process her grief and to come out more artistic and whole, to hide it away until she is done processing it. But as Rita is isolated in the woods and goes through her journey in the swamps and with the Lichen Woman, grief isn’t seen as something to hide, but to, in some ways, embrace.
“Green Fuse Burning” is a meditative and gorgeously written horror story that has moments of intensity, as well as moments of reflection. It’s one of the more unique horror stories I’ve read this year, and I quite enjoyed it.
Rating 8: An unsettling environmental horror that takes on grief and loss, “Green Fuse Burning” is both intense, but also meditative.
Reader’s Advisory:
“Green Fuse Burning” is included on the Goodreads lists “Queer Releases October 2023”, and “Horror To Look Forward To in 2023”.
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