Out there in the dark there's a beckoning candle: stories

Dugdale, Benjamin C. (2021) Out there in the dark there's a beckoning candle: stories. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

OUT THERE IN THE DARK THERE’S A BECKONING CANDLE is a collection of interrelated short stories drawing from various generic influences, chiefly ‘weird,’ ‘gothic,’ ‘queer’ and ‘rural’ fiction. The collection showcases a variety of recurring characters and settings, though from one tale to the next, discrepancies, inversions, and a whelming barrage of transforming motifs force an unhomely displacement between each story, troubling reader assumptions about the various protagonists to envision a lusher plurality of possible selves and futures (a gesture towards queer spectrality, which Carla Freccero defines as the “no longer” and the “not yet”). Utilizing genres known for their unsettling and fantastical potency, the thesis constellates the complex questions of identity politics, toxic interpersonal-relationships, the brutality of capitalism, compulsory urban migration, rituals of grief, intergenerational transmission of trauma, &c., all through a corrupted mal-refracting queer prism; for example, the simple question of what discomfort recurring character Harlanne Welch, non-binary filmmaker, sees when they look into the mirror is demonstrative, when the thing in the mirror takes on its own life with far-reaching consequences. OUT THERE IN THE DARK…is an oneiric, ludic dowsing rod in pursuit of the queer prairie gothic mode just past line of sight on the horizon.

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