Bad Land

Corrina Chong
Arsenal Pulp, 2024
248 pages
ISBN: 9781551529592
$24.95
Reviewed by Ali Dillon-Cardinal

 

“Layers of sediment covers the bones, burying them deeper and deeper over time.”

 

Corrina Chong tells a slow-burning story about repression, guilt, and grief, unfurling an eerie family road trip that will make you question the lengths to which one should go for a family who keeps everything from you. 

Chong introduces her story with a strong but poetic voice that builds tension from cover to cover. Regina is a realistic, relatable, and disarmingly hopeful narrator who subverts expectations. She is a large woman, often invisible to the world, who lives a loner’s life of peace and quiet in Drumheller Alberta for seven years until her brother, Ricky, bursts back into her life.

With him comes his six-year-old daughter, Jez, an “odd” child whose vicious streak and violent tendencies are unnerving. Then there is the issue of his missing wife Carla.

In Drumheller, where dinosaur statues are on every corner, Chong makes clear “the world was full of fake.” The landmarks litter the town she once visited with her parents before her mother left. She has this in common with Jez.

After spending time with Jez, Regina begins to understand there may be other reasons for Ricky’s return. Ricky is keeping a secret “different from the secrets he normally kept— something he feared enough that pretending it was not real was the only option.”  

After a phone call with a news reporter, Regina realizes the situation is more pressing than she initially imagined and when Carla suddenly returns, Regina learns the truth. “Ricky had not, of course, described the scene to (her) in such detail. He’d told me the story as though recounting a myth.”

With new knowledge about her brother and her niece, Regina embarks on a journey away from Drumheller with Jez, their destination unclear. As they drive, Regina begins to  uncover repressed memories of a troubled past, her struggles with her brother, and her own ghosts. “I once believed I had the power to forget. That a memory could be extracted… sealed away in a jar, where it would simply wither away.”

En route, Jez also has a troubling encounter with Regina’s pet bunny, Waldo –“Her arms shot out like bullets from a gun, fingers snatching fur… Waldo made a small, horrible noise… like all the wind had been squeezed from his lungs at once.”

Regina recognizes herself in the stubborn, peculiar girl. She too is prone to missing social cues, so aunt and niece forge an odd connection, with Regina becoming the parental figure she had needed in her own childhood.

Corrina Chong’s debut novel Belinda’s Rings was published by NeWest Press in 2013, and she has had work published in Room, The Humber Literary Review, The Malahat Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Grain, and Best Canadian Stories 2024. Her collection of short stories The Whole Animal was published by Arsenal Pulp in 2023 and earned her a spot on the 2023 Writers to Watch list. She teaches English and Fine Arts at UBC Okanagan in Kelowna, BC on the unseeded territory of the Syilx/Okanagan Peoples.