By Shantell Powell
Content warning: suicide, substance abuse, self-harm, sexual harassment
Francine Cunningham is an award-winning poet and author. She is the winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award and Grain Magazine’s 2018 Short Forms Fiction contest. God Isn’t Here Today is her debut collection of short fiction, and it delves into the speculative realms, frequently dipping into horror with a dark literary touch. It has been longlisted for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize.
Each of the stories is quite different from the other, but many are connected by themes of death and transformation and a fragrant throughline of lemon and lavender. The death of a barman brings life to others. A hunting expedition becomes a death sentence. A dead artist becomes an artistic medium full of love. A meet-cute in a porn shop turns ugly. A pleasure ghost gets a new assignment. The stories contain a distinct viscerality: hemoglobin and skin grafts, fantasies of rough sex and bondage, ice cream melting down forearms, and a DIY trepanation.
The stand-out stories for me include the eponymous story, a surreal tale of a young man seeking audience with God in an unoccupied office. Instead of finding God, he finds other people seeking God. It reminds me a bit of Waiting for Godot by way of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.
I also enjoyed “Spectre Sex,” which imagines ghosts as working stiffs. The protagonist of this story is a sex worker who enjoys his job about as much as someone working in a dead-end cubicle farm enjoys theirs.
“Glitter Like Herpes” gives me a John Waters vibe. Michelle is an aging stripper who makes ends meet by stealing used panties from the other workers and selling them on the dark web. The seedy setting, the betrayal, and the climactic cat fight make me imagine this story acted out by Mink Stole and Divine.
“Mickey’s Bar” follows a deceased barman’s body parts as they bring parts of his personality into their organ recipients, and in return, their memories join with his.
Cunningham experiments with form in this collection. Some pieces are classic short stories, some are free verse, and some are hybrid works, such as “Thirteen Steps” which marches across the pages in paired columns of thirteen paragraphs. Cunningham has provided a musical playlist to accompany the stories in this collection, and the songs sing out the themes of each tale. https://www.francinecunningham.ca/post/god-isn-t-here-today-the-playlist
God Isn’t Here Today may appeal to fans of Joshua Whitehead, Chuck Palahniuk, and the trash cinema of John Waters.
Thank you, Invisible Publishing, for a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.