Review of Caitlin Horrocks’ “Life Among the Terranauts”: Strange Connections
by Eliza Browning
Caitlin Horrocks’s latest collection of short stories, Life Among the Terranauts, revels in moments of unexpected connection in the strangest of places. The inhabitants of her world occupy landscapes as varied as the lush Peruvian jungle, the starry Arizona desert, and a self-sustaining ecological biodome, but she returns again and again to the vast open spaces of the Midwest. Horrocks’s stories are vivid snapshots of human life, capturing the complexities of everyday relationships between friends, family, and strangers.
Life Among the Terranauts often walks the line between the ordinary and the surreal. In “Norwegian for Troll,” the Scandinavian traditions of the Upper Midwest haunt the changing trajectory of a woman’s life, while other stories capture more mundane circumstances and events. A dying woman contemplates her few remaining days in “And Looked Down One As Far As I Could. The title character in “Teacher” reminisces on her interactions with a former student, who has just been arrested for a grisly act of manslaughter. Horrocks ruminates on the various small purposes we serve in the lives of acquaintances and strangers, while highlighting the intensity and unexpected depth of human connection.
One of Horrocks’s earliest stories “Sun City” captures the tenuous sense of solidarity between a young woman named Rose and her late grandmother, Vera. Returning to Vera’s home in the wake of her death to collect her belongings, Rose attempts to determine if the possible romance she envisioned between her grandmother and her roommate Bev was grounded in reality. Rose imagines that she and Vera were “winking, their eyes meeting over the decades, seeing something true in each other,” but Bev resists such easy familiarity. Instead, the evolving understanding between the two women forces them into a grudging respect that encompasses each other’s differences. The lasting connections forged between strangers is a recurring theme of Life Among the Terranauts, a running thread that binds the brief narratives of everyday life.
Rose imagines that she and Vera were “winking, their eyes meeting over the decades, seeing something true in each other,” but Bev resists such easy familiarity … The lasting connections forged between strangers is a recurring theme of Life Among the Terranauts, a running thread that binds the brief narratives of everyday life.
In “23 Months,” a woman hooks up with a man at a party a few days before he is scheduled to report to prison for the accidental death of his girlfriend in a car accident. Having escaped the Midwest and an abusive relationship for a new job in Arizona, the narrator imagines she understands “the murderer’s” mysterious pain. When she later returns to the man she had left, she meditates on the role we play in constructing the narrative of our own lives: “When Sasha got out of prison I was shoveling snow, sharing a bed with a man I told myself I wasn’t afraid of anymore. I told myself everything was fine again, and it became mostly true and stayed mostly true for four mostly good years.” Subverting expectations of personal empowerment, the narrator instead chooses the easier of her two options by returning to her unhealthy relationship, a quietly devastating choice that is nonetheless reflective of reality.
Subverting expectations of personal empowerment, the narrator instead chooses the easier of her two options by returning to her unhealthy relationship, a quietly devastating choice that is nonetheless reflective of reality.
Other stories feature characters bonded by extraordinary circumstances. In the opening story, “The Sleep,” the residents of a dilapidated Midwestern town named Bounty gradually slip into a cycle of hibernation, sleeping all winter and emerging renewed in the spring. The controversial method enables the inhabitants to cope with depression and the hardships of long winters in a dwindling community, bonding the town together against judgmental outsiders. Horrocks deftly intertwines magical realism with the travails of ordinary people, contending with questions of isolation, connection and resilience. When asked why they remain in a dying town, the residents answer in a collective voice: “Our people had moved to Bounty because the land was there and it was empty, and now all we had was the emptiness and one another.”
In the title story, “Life Among the Terranauts,” the narrator struggles to balance her duties as an engineer for NovaTerra, a self-sustaining biodome inspired by the real-life Biosphere 2 in Arizona, with her increasingly obsessive relationship with another resident, Ivan. The six inhabitants of NovaTerra must independently sustain themselves for two years, but Ivan’s unsettling commitment to the cause grows increasingly more alarming to the other Terranauts. Eventually, life inside NovaTerra becomes a chilling game of survival, a fitting end to this haunting collection.
Horrocks deftly intertwines magical realism with the travails of ordinary people, contending with questions of isolation, connection and resilience.
Horrocks’s preoccupation with the unexpected connections formed in isolation is a fitting theme for the COVID-19 era. Reading Life Among the Terranauts a year into the shutdown of ordinary American life, the decision of the residents of Bounty and NovaTerra to embrace their circumstances is resonant and even hopeful. Rather than sink into despair because of their surroundings, the characters find renewed joy in the simplest things: an everyday meal, their dilapidated environment, each other. Horrocks’s writing resists the allure of a wider world beyond a small town; instead, the small town becomes the world.
Horrocks is at her best when casting a thin veneer of strangeness over everyday life, crafting stories that exist between the boundaries of this world and another. Released in January 2021 during the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, these prescient and haunting stories of isolation and survival resonate beyond the page. The vivid stories in Life Among the Terranauts tug at the boundaries of daily existence, exploring the unlikely moments of connection that arise in isolated locations and unexpected circumstances. The collective resilience of ordinary people forms the backbone of this breathtaking collection, which is varied, surprising, and most of all quietly human.
Eliza Browning studied English and art history at Wheaton College in Massachusetts and will be studying for a master's degree in modernist literature at the University of Oxford in 2022-2023. Her work appears in The Adroit Journal, Salamander Magazine, Contrary Magazine, Up the Staircase Quarterly and the Oxford-Cambridge Mays Anthology, among others. An inaugural poetry fellow of the 2019 COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective, she has since helped to direct the program and is passionate about expanding artistic and literary opportunities to students and underserved populations.