Samantha Hunt

Samantha Hunt discusses her new story collection, The Dark Dark with Clara Sankey.

Praise for Samantha Hunt

“Samantha Hunt is astonishing. Her every sentence electrifies. Her characters demand our closest attention. Her new book contains everything that I want in a novel. If I could long-distance mesmerize you, dear reader, into picking up this book and buying it and reading it at once, believe me: I would.”—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble, Magic for Beginners

“I’m speechless. Mr. Splitfoot is so inventive, so new; I haven’t read anything like it in years. On the surface it’s about false spirituality and the most demented road trip across New York State ever attempted, but it’s also about the horrible ties that bind us and the small acts of redemption that make life almost okay. On top of that, it’s a thrilling page-turner. I couldn’t stop reading it.”—Gary Shteyngart, author of Little Failure, Super Sad True Love Story

“Mr. Splitfoot is lyrical, echoing, deeply strange, with a quality of sustained hallucination. It is the best book on communicating with the dead since William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, but it swaps out that novel’s cynicism for a more life-affirming sense of uncertainty.”—Luc Sante, author of Low Life

About The Dark Dark

From the acclaimed author of Mr. Splitfoot, Samantha Hunt’s first collection of stories, The Dark Dark, blends the literary and the fantastic and brings us characters on the verge―girls turning into women, women turning into deer, people doubling or becoming ghosts, and more

Strange things happen all around us all the time, but is it best to acknowledge or to turn away from moments when the weird pokes its way into our ordinary lives?

In these marvelously inventive stories, Samantha Hunt imagines numerous ways in which lives might be altered by the otherworldly. An FBI agent falls in love with a robot built for a suicide mission. A young woman unintentionally cheats on her husband when she is transformed, nightly, into a deer. Two strangers become lovers and find themselves somehow responsible for the resurrection of a dog. A woman tries to start her life anew after the loss of a child but cannot help riddling that new life with lies. Thirteen pregnant teenagers develop a strange relationship with the Founding Fathers of American history. A lonely woman’s fertility treatments become the stuff of science fiction.

Magic intrudes. Technology betrays and disappoints. Infidelities lead us beyond the usual conflict. Our bodies change, reproduce, decay, and surprise. With her characteristic unguarded gaze and offbeat humor, Hunt has conjured stories that urge an understanding of youth and mortality, magnification and loss, and hold out the hope that we can know one another more deeply or at least stand side by side to observe the mystery of the world.