Growing up, Samantha Hunt’s mother kept a saying by Pascal on their kitchen fridge: On mourra seul—-everyone will die alone. That may seem downright macabre for a place most people pin cheery magnets and family photos, but it helps inform where her honest, haunted characters are coming from in her first collection of stories, The Dark Dark. In it, siblings witness the gruesome killing of a horse on a walk to Walmart, an inventor falls in love with the robot he created to kill the Unabomber, and in “Love Story,” which appeared this spring in the New Yorker, a mother of young children unspools her most morbid and hilarious thoughts in bed beside the husband she hasn’t had sex with in months. She talks about the book — “An excellent, inventive collection…rife with observant asides, sly humor, and surprises,” says Publisher’s Weekly — with author James Hannaham, Tuesday July 18 at Greenlight.
