A review by jasonfurman
The Dark Dark: Stories by Samantha Hunt

4.0

This collection of semi-linked short stories was excellent. Samantha Hunt's trademark gritty reality combined with a dark unreality that is more likely madness than the supernatural but you are not always sure. Not quite as good as her first two novels (The Seas and The Invention of Everything Else), but I liked every one of the stories. Thematically they tended to be similar--usually middle-aged women, dealing with their desire or their husbands, often broken or bad marriages, and engaging in all of this from a position of strength. But there are some more bizarre ones, like the dialogue between a remote control robot/remote control bomb and the Unabomber on the problems with technology and a meta story within story about a women who in an effort to have a baby ends up creating a dirtier but smarter clone of herself. Worth reading all of the stories and in order as they follow thematically and even contain sly references to each other--with the exception of the robot/unabomber which was more of a pleasant diversion.