In the Imperial City

On the southern edge of Sarnia, Ontario, lies a cluster of more than sixty oil refineries and petrochemical plants, an industrial wasteland known as Chemical Valley. In the 164 years since Lambton County became the site of North America’s first commercial oil well, this small city at the mouth of the St. Clair River has turned into one of the most polluted places in Canada. Toxic chemicals pour from smokestacks, carcinogens ride the breeze, black muck leaks up from the soil, and residents stand a shockingly high chance of dying of leukemia. It is not a particularly cheerful setting for a series of short stories, but then David Huebert has never been a particularly cheerful writer. Thank God for that. First in his 2017 collection Peninsula Sinking and now in Chemical Valley, Huebert’s uncanny facility for spinning densely poetic fiction out of the tawdry horror of twenty-first-century life has made him one of the most captivating...