Nicholas Herring's novel Some Hellish is about the existential dread of life — read an excerpt now
The novel won the $60,000 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
Nicholas Herring's novel Some Hellish is about a lobster fisher named Herring who is facing the existential dread of what he feels is a boring, mundane life. That is, until one December day when he decides to cut a hole in the living room floor and alter the course of his life as he knows it. Through a myriad of absurd and confronting experiences, including his wife and children leaving him, Tibetan monks rescuing him after a near-death experience, Herring is forced to reckon with himself, his fear and what it means to be alive.
Some Hellish won the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers's Trust Fiction Prize. The $60,000 award recognizes the best novel or short story collection published in Canada.
"Lobster fishing, on P.E.I., anyway, is this incredible industry. It's a ton of work. Your days are long, you're up early. It's very dangerous. It's kind of a beautiful industry, in that, given the danger of the job, it's kind of a commonplace thing that men and women are willing to go out on the water and risk their lives so that other people can eat lobster," Herring told The Next Chapter in an interview.
"I wanted to write something that was entertaining; something that was beautiful and truthful and difficult. I really wanted to write something that was kind of like life — as I see it at this moment in time."
Herring is a writer and carpenter from Murray Harbour, P.E.I. Some Hellish is his debut novel.
You can read an excerpt from Some Hellish below.
Herring felt anxious about getting back out onto the waters. His temper grew short. He had no desire to be snappy, but he felt as tight as a hamstring. He made sure the girls had applied their sunscreen and put their life jackets on. They got the canoe into the waters and loaded her up, Gerry in the bow, the girls in the middle, and Herring at the stern. The sun was out and the sky was a light blue, a sheet of periwinkle. The water was dark and had a bit of chop to it. And jellyfish everywhere. Herring told the girls to watch the direction of the grasses at the bottom of the channel. From these you could tell if the tide was falling or rising.
They headed north for Herring Island.
LISTEN | Nicholas Herring on setting a novel in the P.E.I. lobster industry:
About halfway across the channel, near the sandbar infested with gulls and terns and shags, Herring was staring absentmindedly to his port side when something caught his eye. There appeared to be a great dip in the surface of the water, a singular incongruence, not so much as if there was a hole or even a kind of puncture in the water, but as if the weight of the atmosphere was being plunged downward in this solitary spot, like a dipstick, or sailors performing soundings with a great stick in a sea that was just a basket of woolen blankets. He watched this valley deepen, entranced by its descent. The waters within this trough enacted a slow gradient from azure to charcoal. He had a sense that there was a great pressure to it, that he was like an ant watching humans knuckling down to play a game of marbles. Things had been hit in a way that suggested everything was rotating. He saw himself as he had been, trying to keep moving, shaking with the cold, high on acid, confused, and mostly wondering if anyone would come out for him.
He felt himself at once, over and through time and over and through all of the distances of his small, stupid, beautiful life. He knew that he felt love, that he had love in his heart.
Then he saw himself again, kicking, propelling himself away, in any which direction. And then he saw himself again, pushed by the current in another direction, such that the versions of himself were multiplying. His descendants grew in number each time he blinked, and the effect was that he, the sight of his other selves, became an immense, congealed kind of smear. He would look around and see that, yes, he had been there, at the same time that he had been over there. And then he understood that he was here, too, in the stern of his fibreglass canoe, cutting through the waters in another direction altogether. He realized, too, that before these versions of himself, he had been upon the boat with Gerry. And then before that, on the road in the dark. It was as if his whole existence had been committed to a reel of magnetic tape, and this reel had fallen out of its container and the tape was spinning outward as much as it was spinning inward.
LISTEN | Nicholas Herring talks about Some Hellish on The Next Chapter:
There was no anxiety or fight or struggle. The falling of the tape hadn't been an accident. It was just a thing that was happening. He, his existence, was a kind of streak that, from a distance, seemed like pure and utter chaos. However, up close, examined and considered, it had a flow to it that was reassuring, even kind of majestic. Through all of this unspooling, this forwarding and rewinding, the beat of his heart, the pump and flex of its muscle. Sometimes his hands were in his pockets. Sometimes he was surrounded by old friends. Sometimes he was smiling, and sometimes he was crying. He felt himself at once, over and through time and over and through all of the distances of his small, stupid, beautiful life. He knew that he felt love, that he had love in his heart.
Excerpted from Some Hellish copyright © 2022 by Nicholas Herring. Reprinted by permission of Goose Lane Editions.
