Books like Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems

Most people know Margaret Atwood as a novelist \ (The Blind Assassin,\ The MaddAddam Trilogy, Cat’s Eye, most recently \ The Heart Goes Last).\ But she’s also an excellent short story writer, poet and essayist. This slim volume from 1983 feels like a hybrid of those last three genres; the writing’s looser than in her poetry collections, but the pieces aren’t long enough to be considered stories. Vignettes? Perhaps. “Prose poems” is an apt description, but many of them are as chock full of ideas as her essays. The subjects range from childhood reminiscences – making poison with her brother; finding a grandfather’s collection of Boys Own Annuals in the attic; her history of fainting – to a series of riffs on finding “the real” Mexico, not the tourist version.The strongest section contains the title story, in which a parlor game becomes a metaphor for the writer/reader dynamic, as well as "Women's Novels," a clever look at gender and genre fiction. "Simmering" is an amusing speculative fiction piece (she wrote it before her first SF book, The Handmaid's Tale) about men taking over the kitchen. My favourite piece is a deadpan meditation on narrative possibilities called “Happy Endings.” The story “Liking Men” starts with a funny, sly look at men and sexual politics and transforms into a disturbing comment on rape, power and genocide. The final piece, “Instructions For The Third Eye,” is about the subversive power and vision of the writer – something this clever author, with this unique book, has just demonstrated yet again.