Hypertext Magazine asked Aimee Parkison, author of Suburban Death Project, “Why did you decide to title your story collection Suburban Death Project?”

By Aimee Parkison

The 12 stories in the collection (published by Unbound Edition Press and originally appearing in such journals as Adroit, Big Other, Bellingham Review, Arkansas Review, Lake Effect, The Laurel Review, and Litro US) are mostly located far from cities but not quite in the country.  Most are set in the great “in-between,” average US neighborhoods, where wives and daughters, ghosts and surgeons, widows, and witnesses meet lovers of the night sky and dark waters.

The stories range from slipstream to realism to surrealism, from gothic to satire, from feminist to fractured fantasy.  The narratives are inhabited by such figures as an amputee who fishes for owls, a woman who can’t stop laughing after her husband’s suicide, and the legend of a runaway girl who lives in a lighthouse and haunts the tunnels of a seaside cave. There are also insect actors, the DNA of extinct animals preserved in tattoos, a dildo in lapis lazuli, and women who escape their childhoods by succumbing to magic or mourning their husbands by tasting the fruit that grows from their bodies.

Suburban Death Project breathes life into what is barely surviving: ill-fated families, dangerous relationships, and frightening loves. With a dark humor serving to make unimaginable traumas both tolerable and knowable, the collection delves into marriage and mourning, lust and loss, and violence and its aftermath. It exposes the horrors of life in its bodily form and relieves them with a passionate wonder burning so brightly it outshines age, death, and family secrets. In average American households, families haunt each other while still alive as they recompose into dragonflies, peach trees, squirrels, ducks, owls, shadows, tunnels, and zoos of endangered species. Pinned to boards for study, peered at by voyeurs, videoed by neighbors, or vivisected for the greater good, each body in the stories undergoes an unflinching examination.

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Related Feature: Excerpt: Aimee Parkison’s SUBURBAN DEATH PROJECT

Aimee Parkison is widely published and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including: the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize; the Kurt Vonnegut Prize from North American Review; the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction; a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, a Puffin Foundation Fellowship, and a William Randolph Hearst Creative Artists Fellowship. She teaches creative writing in the MFA/PhD program at Oklahoma State University. Her newest book is Suburban Death Project (Unbound Edition 2022.)  More information can be found at www.aimeeparkison.com.  Parkison is on Twitter @AimeeParkison

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Hypertext Magazine & Studio (HMS) publishes original, brave, and striking narratives of historically marginalized, emerging, and established writers online and in print. HMS empowers Chicago-area adults by teaching writing workshops that spark curiosity, empower creative expression, and promote self-advocacy. By welcoming a diversity of voices and communities, HMS celebrates the transformative power of story and inclusion. We invite our audience to read the narratives we publish so that, together, we can navigate our complex world.

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