The Dark Dark: Stories

Winner of the 2019 St. Francis College Literary Prize
A 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Finalist
A 2017 Shirley Jackson Award nominee
An NPR Best Book of 2017
A Vogue Best Book We Read All Year
A Huffington Post Best Fiction Book of 2017
A Kirkus Best Fiction of 2017 pick
A National Post (Canada) Best Book of 2017
A Chicago Review of Books Best Fiction Books of 2017 pick
An Electric Literature Best Short Story Collection of 2017
A Paris Review staff pick
A W Magazine Book by Women Writers to Read This Summer

"The Dark Dark . . . wields such a subtle and alien power that I couldn't read more than a couple of pieces in a sitting without feeling like some witchy substance was working its way through my blood . . . Wonderfully spooky." --Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

"Beguiling . . . daring . . . Hunt at her best is a lot like the uncle of one character, who is described as 'so good at imagining things' that 'he makes the imagined things real.' Hunt's dreamlike images operate in service to earthbound ideas . . . [She] gets at the myriad ways women work to keep their self-possession in the face of social and interpersonal expectations." --John Williams, The New York Times

A daring collection in which Hunt gives her imagination free reign, allowing her characters to careen off the rails in their search for something more in the darkness. --Joy Press, Los Angeles Times

Liminal fantasy with a solid literary sensibility; sure to please fans of Karen Russell and Lidia Yuknavitch . . . The Dark Dark chews on some delicious, evergreen themes in extraordinary ways. --Carmen Maria Machado, NPR

"The Dark Dark, more than anything else, is an example of the sheer force of storytelling, of the power of narrative to elicit understanding and emotional response at an unspeakable, unspoken level." --Robert J. Wiersema, The National Post

The Dark Dark reads like a feminist manifesto threaded through imaginative fiction; it's the most evocative, impressive collection I've read this year. --Daniel Johnson, The Paris Review

Hunt, with the publication of her first collection of stories, "The Dark Dark, '' is poised to break through as one of our major fiction writers . . . Hunt is by turns hilarious, wry, wrenching, and lyrical. --Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe

Each of the stories in this collection harbors a surreal twist . . . Hunt lingers over such moments just long enough to suggest that the phantasmagorical can be found in any situation, no matter how banal. --The New Yorker

Rife with symbolism and feminist subtext, Hunt's prose style and ability to weave together fantastical details and factual research into stunningly original scenes makes for captivating reading. --Bust

The stories are marked with superbly nuanced writing, a rich sense of visual detail and perhaps a kind of courage on the part of the author, as she dares blending fantasy with naturalism. --David Wiegand, The San Francisco Chronicle

Samantha Hunt writes about the ordinary through a supernatural kaleidoscope. She holds the mundane and extraordinary up to the light and tries to explain the shadows . . . Hunt's writing does not gloss over the dark, ugly parts of womanhood. Instead, she allows women the space to be wild in ways the real world does not--by writing with empathy and grace. --Carolyn Quimby, Chronogram

The stories intertwine what's extraordinary and familiar in meaningful ways, taking on density and weight . . . Reading pleasures abound in Hunt's incisive and witty prose and characters who linger in the mind like acquaintances you hope to meet again." --Katie Pelletier, The Portland Mercury

What makes The Dark Dark so refreshing is Hunt's willingness to work in the unapologetically weird . . . It's a welcome statement of purpose, and a reminder that certain familiar places and themes are ripe for their own fictional revival. --Tobias Carroll, Bookforum

Like in our best Lynchean dreams, these are stories with talons dipped into the eerie and the supernatural . . . The writing in The Dark Dark is swoon-worthy, and craft-wise, there is not one hair out of place. In fact, if you were standing before me I might push this book immediately into your hands . . . Samantha Hunt has written a perfect story collection. --Ingrid Rojas Contreras, KQED's The Spine

These short stories are works of dark, dark magic that skitter between worlds both recognizable and wholly new. Fans of Hunt's work will revel in her first story collection, which marries her signature flare for the fantastic with keen observation and sharp prose . . . Grab your comforter and a flashlight for this tour de force collection from one of our most inventive storytellers. --Kirkus, starred review

Designed to jolt and beguile . . . This excellent, inventive collection . . . is rife with observant asides, sly humor, and surprises. --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"I was enamored with Mr. Splitfoot and didn't think Samantha Hunt could top that book. I was wrong. The stories in The Dark Dark keep getting better as the book goes on, and by the end I was spellbound. You'd be hard-pressed to find another author like Samantha Hunt. These stories explore not only extraneous terrors (the dark night and the unknown horrors it holds), but also the deep-down fears and savagery and strangeness that exist beyond our understanding. Hunt mines the depths of our subconscious inhumanity to reveal what connects us in ways we can't imagine, and in her fantastic stories lie the real and familiar. The darkest dark is not an outside entity, but our own humanity, and nobody but Hunt can illuminate the shadowy corners of the soul so well." --Rachel Kaplan, Avid Bookshop, Athens, GA

"In stories full of doubles and doppelgangers, splitting cells and shadowy figures, Samantha Hunt evokes the uncanny in areas--suburbia, motherhood, marriage--all too often made mundane by lesser writers. In Hunt's singular voice, however, a wife's desire becomes a matter of bodily metamorphosis; a dusty backroad becomes a portal between worlds. Vivid and uncompromising, each story is unsettling--not only to the characters within it, upended by a world gone sideways, but to the reader, who recognizes in those characters her own weird thoughts and longings. There it is, the strangeness at the center of our lives, laid bare and fairly pulsing on the page." --Mairead Small Staid, Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor, MI