The story — an unsettling dystopian parable — was stylistically daring, relentlessly dark and more emotionally taxing than anything he’d attempted before. He thought it would never get published. But when he sat down in his Dublin home and typed out the novel’s opening passages, he couldn’t stop.
“The damn thing had its own momentum,” Lynch said. “It just sucked me in.”
Scientists have dubbed this enigmatic animal the Cross Seamount beaked whale because it was near the Cross Seamount—an underwater mountain off southwestern Hawai‘i—that they first heard its calls in 2005. Since then, scientists haven’t been quite sure what to make of it. Some think the whale might be a known species—maybe it’s actually the poorly understood ginkgo-toothed beaked whale, an animal understood mostly from strandings. Or maybe, McCullough suggests, it’s a previously undiscovered one: “I’m not taking it off the table,” she says.
The truth is, nobody knows for sure. But McCullough wants to find out. She and her colleagues recently combed through nearly 20 years of recordings of the whale. Like a new fan going through a band’s back catalog, they listened closely. The recordings have convinced biologists the whale is a type of beaked whale—a relative of other deep-water dwellers like the Cuvier’s beaked whale and True’s beaked whale. But its behaviors differ from its cousins.
The “world famous” descriptor is a bit of a running gag in the community of Langlois (which locals pronounce either as “Lang-less” or “Lang-loyce”). The story goes that in 2014, community members were trying to get the speed limit along U.S. 101 lowered through town. But the Oregon Department of Transportation questioned whether tiny Langlois had enough of what they called “road culture” to encourage drivers to slow down.
So, a committee of locals decided to drum up some “road culture,” and they installed signs along the highway that read “Welcome to World Famous Langlois.” Surely that would get drivers’ attention.
When finishing a novel, there is an introspective sweet spot before publication and after the final edits get turned in, when, in a quiet anxious period, I’m forced to look at my creation, to try and understand what I have done, to remember how this thing was formed. An important question for any journey: what do I think, now that it’s over?
Stripped down to the barest narrative elements of character and event, Davis’ flash fiction requires the reader to actively engage in the production of meaning. We are forced to fill in the blanks to find some sense of resolution or satisfaction.
Naoise Dolan’s second novel, “The Happy Couple,” is a study not of love or romance but of the motivating force of self-delusion.