Carita Forsgren’s “Hairball” (2008) begins with a foul smell emanating from a shower drain. What’s down there isn’t just any hairball clog. “I had an image of it dancing around me in a shiny seventies disco outfit and John Travolta’s hair,” the narrator tells us.
When the narrator pulls the clog free, Forsgren releases the reader’s grip on reality. This hair doesn’t only stink; the black mass deposited on the floor “quivers.” Soon, that quivering mass transforms into something strangely lovable. That you believe every wondrous word of Forsgren’s tall tale is a writerly feat to behold.
Edgar Allan Poe famously described a good short story as one that had a “unity of effect,” one that could be felt fully by a reader during one sitting. To me, the effect of “Hairball” is the unified stuff of the uncanny itself.
To explain to exactly how “Hairball” gives the reader a shake is to ruin the fun for a first-time reader. But I can permit myself to pique your interest by saying that the story involves the unlikeliest romance, a jealous roommate, and that individually peculiar challenge of keeping love alive.
The story’s economy of words evokes a vibrant emotional landscape filled with all of those seemingly inexpressible feelings of longing. I have had these tumultuous urges to desire something strange before, but I only recognize them fully when I see them happen in other people, in other characters. Credit goes to Forsgren (a Finnish writer) and her translators, Anna Volmari and J. Robert Tupasela, for describing this alternate reality-like journey into the shapeshifting nature of desire with such redolent prose.
A lot has been written—theoretical, historical, and endlessly instructional—about Poe’s famous prescription for good writing. The Poe Museum succinctly explains what the “unity of effect” means: “every element of a story should help create a single emotional impact.” That we’re still referencing this idea, which Poe teased out in his oft-cited review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1842) and later in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), says volumes about Poe’s prophetic stature.
Had Poe read “Hairball,” he would’ve gushed. This is one those great short stories that achieves a unity of effect in its own peculiar way. The narrator’s love for the hairball excites an uncanny sense of how vulnerable and changing love can feel, and the reader identifies with this struggle at the core level. But press this reader, for example, to explain how “Hairball” really works? I don’t know if I could. It’s magic.
Early in “Hairball,” the narrator rejects the hairball’s initial romantic advances and sends it away. The hairball begins sleeping in her roommate’s room. Jealousy ensues.
One day, when Rosa had a big exam, I told the hairball that I was no longer mad at it.
“If you want, you can come back to my room,” I said. “You can even sleep next to me, if you don’t snore or smell too much.”
Rosa didn’t speak to me for a week after that.
My relationship with the hairball was purely platonic until one night I dreamed that I was embracing my ex-boyfriend.
If you asked me to summarize this sequence, I just couldn’t do it justice. I know what it means, because I’ve felt these feelings before. Yet the deceptively simple prose conveys a depth of longing I’m not brave enough to describe by myself. On the level of magician-grade storytelling happening here, where Forsgren puts me in her story trance, I don’t want to explain what any of her sequences really mean. I want her storytelling to stand by itself, a little off-center from my full understanding.
Poe had something to say about pinning down meaning: it didn’t have to be fully rendered but it must be fully implied. The unity of effect, in Poe’s mind, could succeed as an ineffable one. In “Composition,”1 he wrote:
Two things are invariably required—first, some amount of complexity, or more properly, adaptation; and secondly, some amount of suggestiveness—some undercurrent, however indefinite, of meaning. It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of that richness (to borrow from colloquy a forcible term) which we are too fond of confounding with the ideal. It is the excess of the suggested meaning—it is the rendering this the upper instead of the under current of the theme—which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind) the so called poetry of the so called transcendentalists.
It is rich suggestiveness that gives “Hairball” its transcendental power. The scenario literally quivers on the page in order to figuratively unsettle our minds. We know the tall tale being told is essentially true. When pressed to explain why, however? Like me, you might say, “Just read it for yourself. It’s too uncanny for me to say for sure.”
“Hairball” is included in It Came from the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction (2013) edited by Desirina Boskovich. The book comes from Cheeky Frog Books (Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), which shines a spotlight on my kinda weird.
Image: cover design of It Came from the North by Jeremy Zerfoss.
Poe was writing about poetry and how he composed “The Raven” in this essay, but his insights can be equally applied to a formula for a good short story. Like “The Raven,” a good short story should be read in a single sitting—preferably 30 minutes to two hours, Poe insisted—so it can be felt by the reader uninterrupted, in its totality.