Book Review : Kelby Losack - Hurricane Season (2021)
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Part of being an adult consists in 1) being astonished at every adult milestone you achieve (graduate college, get married, pay taxes, suffer from erectile dysfunction and 2) feeling terrified of being a fraud and eventually losing everything you built your life around. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes you never really get it off the ground at all. Kelby Losack’s novella Hurricane Season is about that fear coming true and it’s also not about that at all
It’s a Gothic folktale in the most classical sense of the term, except it is set in the twenty-first century.
So, what is Hurricane Season exactly? Because the form matters to the narrative intent here. It’s a series of very short portraits (sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a page) of a man and his cousin waiting out a nasty hurricane and witnessing the world rotting around them. They are trapped in an eternal present while the past is being washed away in front of their eyes and the future is rapidly disintegrating. They become prisoners of their own lives.
Them damned books where nothing happens
The biggest criticism that can be lobbed at Hurricane Season is that nothing happens in it, which is both true and kind of the fucking point. Kelby Losack’s hurricane both serves a literal and a metaphorical function to the narrative. Both are cool, but I’m way more interested in the latter. The storm breaks their connection to the world: friends, jobs, perspective of a tomorrow. It traps them into an eternal present where they clumsily try to exist.
One of my favorite passages was when cousin Marcel assassinates the raccoon in the yard and when the narrator freaks out, Marcel only answers “huh?” because of the gunshot ringing in his ears. This was a great example of the world severing connection between two individuals. Something horrible just happened and the only possible moral reaction to it was drowned by echoes. It’s one of those simple, raw moments that Losack is really good at exploring.
So yeah, nothing happens and everything happens in Hurricane Season. Each portrait is charged with heavy metaphorical meaning, which is most apparent whenever the raccoon’s ghost shows up and blurs the line between reality and the mystical space. The two protagonists are trying to engage with the world in their own way and the universe is viciously denying them any sort of reciprocity. They are doomed to exist in a liminal space.
The purpose of ghosts
Ghosts are a crucial symbol in Hurricane Season. They are harbingers of a hidden reality that is slowly revealing itself through the storm. In the occult, manifestations of the world outside of yourself are reflections of the world within. So, by interacting with the world and altering it, you end up altering yourself. You end up creating real actual ghosts that follow you everywhere. Symbols of your failures that resonate endlessly.
In the book, Marcel kills a raccoon. It seems like an innocent gesture enough, but it creates a literal and metaphorical ghost that haunts him and the narrator. Both of them live out their failure to live in harmony with the carnivorous nature around them over and over again. Ghosts are such an obsessive theme in Hurricane Season, it feels like a black metal riff looping unto itself over and over again. It’s darkly beautiful.
Maybe I’m reading Hurricane Season a little personally. Maybe I feel that my own fears of falling out of touch with the world and being condemned to an eternal present are being heard and echoed back by a kindred spirit. But isn’t it the ultimate purpose of art? Granting strangers access to your self, so that they can feel less alone in the universe? In that sense, Hurricane Season is a tremendous success.
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So, should you read Hurricane Season? Probably, but it’s not exactly “E for everyone”. It’s a very niche, artful writing that is meant for the thrill seekers, the existentially lonely and the emotionally violent. It is by nature marginal. But if you’re reading this, you’re not exactly a normie, aren’t you? You’re longing for emotional experiences that are going to leave their mark on you. Well, this might do it.
