sewn paper
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Fiction / Stories
October 1994
160 pages
ISBN 0-88984-145-4
$12.95
A Litany
in Time of Plague
K.D. Miller
`I was never a child,' asserts K.D. Miller, author of two collections of short fiction from
The Porcupine's Quill. `Or at least, the child in me was ``killed'' sometime before my conscious
memory kicks in.' No particular traumatic event or series of events brought this about, Miller
says. In fact, her childhood sounds boringly routine. Miller grew up in Hamilton, Ontario in the
1950's world of housewives and breadwinners, of pink plastic radios in the kitchen and
workbenches in the basement, of fathers who hardly spoke and mothers who couldn't stop talking.
All of this finds its way into her stories, along with the feeling `of being different, of not quite
fitting in, of being here on sufferance,' and the distinct sense that `the world could be a dark and
menacing place.'
A Litany in Time of Plague is K.D. Miller's first collection of
short fiction. The `plague' of the title story is a reference not only
to AIDS but to its ironic companion, loneliness.
Miller's child characters are like little aliens dropped into a world that wavers from
incomprehensible to bewildering, and yet, there is a knowing in them, an
attunement to the `voice under the voice' that is
disquieting. In `This Is Important' in Litany in Time of Plague, Arley is
being questioned by her mother and a policeman about the man who followed her home from
Brownies in his car. As she listens to them, she
remembers the man `who came out of the dark.
He was like a piece of the dark' and, unlike the policeman
and her mother, talked to her `in his
real voice,' and treated her with respect and courtesy. `Nobody ever talked to me like that
before.... It was harder to say no thank you that time.' The dark stranger comes to represent the
answer to all the mysteries the grownups withhold from her, the knowledge of good and evil, like
the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Only when she hears through to the need and fear beneath his
voice, does she turn away.
Each of the characters in the ten linked stories comes to the end of
his or her spiritual rope. Kelly attends a Requiem Mass where she adds
her and her ex-husband's names to a list of the dead. Arley pursues a dangerous
fantasy down one dark alley after another. Raymond learns that his inability
to love is exactly matched by his need to do just that.
`Miller has created a mesmerizing core of characters for her stories ... it
is a testament to Miller's emerging genius that she makes us care so much about her characters
and their fates, their courage, and their compromises.' `Keep an eye out for K.D. Miller: this is a new writer worth watching.'
- Quill & Quire
- Ottawa Citizen
