My Atwood Project, Part 7B: Murder in the Dark + Good Bones

I was going to include Good Bones, Murder in the Dark, and the combination volume, Good Bones and Simple Murders, with Wilderness Tips, but they deserve their own post, as they contain a very different type of short fiction. Murder in the Dark came out in Canada in 1983, then some pieces from it were combined with most of Good Bones (1992) and reissued as Good Bones and Simple Murders in 1994. 

Murder in the Dark contains several short pieces -- not traditional short stories -- that seem to be autobiographical and focus on the present or recent past, as is typical for Atwood’s work from that pre-Handmaid’s Tale era. It also includes some feminist pieces, such as “Simmering,” in which men take over all cooking, and some writing experiments, such as “Happy Endings,” which briefly explores several ways a relationship might play out.

Good Bones, on the other hand, focuses more on retelling and perspective changes, such as retelling the story of the Little Red Hen to highlight her passivity, or Queen Gertrude's reaction to her son's harangue in Hamlet, which portrays her as the opposite of passive. Atwood went on to pursue this method in longer works, The Penelopiad and Hag-Seed, the first a retelling of the Odyssey from Penelope's point of view and the second a retelling of The Tempest from Caliban's. Another type of perspective change is strange making, where something known is described in a new way to make it unrecognizable at first. For example, in the story titled “The Adventure,” we might first assume some people are on a trip, but it turns out to be a description of sperm implanting an egg. 

The pieces I like most focus on humanity's problematic future, because as you might know, I'm a big sci-fi fan. In “Epaulettes,” war is replaced by a sort of beauty pageant for men. They don fancy uniforms and speak about their wishes for “the good of humanity,” just like female pageant participants. The winner rules the world, but only for a year.

In other short pieces, such as “Hardball” and “We Want It All,” Atwood takes on pollution and climate change. She was well informed before many of us because her father was a scientist who studied insect infestations in the forests of northern Canada, and shared his opinions on the disappearing wilderness with his family at the dinner table. 

Murder in the Dark and Good Bones each contain 27 stories -- coincidence? Eleven pieces, less than half, from Murder in the Dark made the move into the combined book, whereas almost every piece from Good Bones, all but four, made the cut. I’m curious why neither “Epaulettes” nor “The Adventure” was included. Both “Simmering” (included) and “Epaulettes” (not) place men in traditionally female roles; perhaps they were considered too similar. 

At any rate, for the full Atwood experience, you would have to read both the earlier collections, because neither is fully represented in the combined volume.