Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire’s darkest hollows—those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. In this debut collection of short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood.
Sheila, the narrator of Kimberly King Parson's story 'Guts,' can't run away from bodies: not her own, not others' ... Parsons brings heartbreaking details to 'Guts' ... It's a beautiful and uncomfortable story, just like all the others in Black Light, Parsons' wild and compassionate debut collection ... Black Light isn't at all suffocating, and Parsons doesn't wallow in gloom. She writes with the unpredictable power of a firecracker, bringing flashes of illumination to people who struggle with disappointment, both in themselves and others. Every story in this collection is beyond remarkable, and Parsons proves herself to be a gutsy country-punk poet with a keen eye and a stubbornly unique sensibility.
Like many of the characters within them, these stories are constantly in flux, revealing new facets while refusing to conform to any preset template ... 'Guts' treads the border of the fantastical, while later stories like 'The Animal Part' and 'Foxes' blend horror imagery with an unnerving ambiguity. Parsons’ forays into the uncanny are more hallucinatory than anything else, a heightening of the characters’ reality rather than a revelation that that reality is beyond what they’d imagined ... A sense of yearning and loss connects the stories, though their tones and subjects vary wildly ... What characterizes many of these stories and helps them stand out is Parsons’ unpredictable yet effective way of parceling out information ... Parsons also deftly navigates questions of class, establishing the economic disparity between several sets of characters in passing without ever feeling heavy-handed or dogmatic. This ultimately leaves Black Light as a collection that, at various moments, recalls the work of Katherine Dunn, Alice Munro, and Denis Johnson. But Parsons also charts her own territory with stories that offer the promise of transcendence and desire while simultaneously threatening the pain of regret and loss. Most hauntingly, Black Light reminds readers that these sets are not mutually exclusive, nor are they anything close to predictable.