Book review: Mooncalves an eerie, disturbing, stunning first novel
Credit to Author: Lionel Wild| Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2020 18:00:50 +0000
Mooncalves author Victoria Hetherington first garnered attention and Ontario Arts Council grants with her 2014 digital fiction project ‘I Have to Tell You.’
By Victoria Hetherington (Now or Never Publishing, 2019)
$19.95 | 248pp
A “mooncalf” is defined variously as an abortive or monstrous birth, a fool or dullard, or a minor creature mentioned in the Harry Potter books.
Like its title, Toronto debut novelist Victoria Hetherington’s new work is subject to many ambiguous and resonating interpretations. Some luminaries of an earlier generation of Canadian writers, notably Margaret Atwood, called their work Southern Ontario Gothic.
The arrival of Hetherington’s unique narrative voice may announce the coming of a new genre. Call it Post Singularity Toronto Gothic, if you will. You may be tempted, if you are as impressed by this debut as this reviewer is, to see Hetherington as the millennial generation’s persuasive answer to Atwood.
Only time will tell, of course, whether Hetherington can sustain a long and prolific career to match Atwood’s, but this stunning first novel is a remarkable down payment on that project.
Hetherington, whose day job is as a digital and marketing specialist, first garnered attention and Ontario Arts Council grants with her 2014 digital fiction project “I Have to Tell You.” Her new work, Mooncalves, has been attracting a lot of literary excitement since its publication by Now or Never Publishing, a tiny B.C. house based in Surrey, this year.
Bret Josef Grubsic, for example, enthused in a Toronto Star review: “The novel brims with tonal shifts — gruesome violence, eerie sci-fi, black comedy, oddball, deeply urban bits that wouldn’t be out of place in the Netflix series Russian Doll, irreverent but laugh-aloud scenes from the sex wars and eye-catching absurdity.”
Mooncalves, by Victoria Hetherington
This seems about right to me, and is echoed in many other reviews that note Hetherington’s deft hand with complex narrative structure and fearless, unflinching images of the drug and sex lives of the Toronto young.
The narrative in Mooncalves is centred on an apocalyptic cult in Quebec led by a charismatic leader, Joseph. He gathers his followers around a vision of the coming Merge, an event in which all the data and digital devices unite and turn on their hapless human creators. This science-fiction element is perhaps the least disturbing part of this book, which goes much further into the darkness when it depicts transgressive human relations than when it imagines a coming Singularity event.
Don’t turn to Mooncalves for page-turning, mindless entertainment.
But if you want a serious and thoughtful literary fiction that has important things to say about the human condition, this is the book for you.
Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. While he is worried about the Singularity, he fears Twitter and Snapchat more. He welcomes your feedback and story ideas at tos65@telus.net
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