Deep Water, Dark Horizons 

By Suzanne Hudson 

Livingston Press, 2025 

Paperback: $22.00 

Genre: Short Fiction, Essays 

Reviewed by Edward Journey 

Cover of DEEP WATER, DARK HORIZONS. Cover is an image of dark clouds over the ocean, creating a grey and grey-blue color field.

Sometimes, the stories in Deep Water, Dark Horizons, Suzanne Hudson’s “Truman Capote collection” of stories and essays, take place in raked dirt front yards and sleazy dive bar parking lots, probing the lower depths of desperation. Occasionally, the setting might be the well-appointed home of a social striver. In these somehow familiar stories, strivers are everywhere, each clawing, often recklessly, to improve their passage through angst and futility. Not to worry, though – a feisty humor often pops up to salve the burn.  

Born in Georgia and raised in Alabama, Suzanne Hudson is the 2025 winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of Literary Non-Fiction or the Short Story. Deep Water, Dark Horizons is a showcase of her remarkable talent – especially impressive since Hudson put her writing on the back burner for a quarter century while she was a teacher and guidance counselor in public schools. 

The first story in Deep Water, Dark Horizons, “LaPrade,” is a 1977 prizewinner, originally published in Penthouse for a competition that had Toni Morrison and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. as judges. A story presented in such a stoic manner that an elderly father’s emotional and physical abuse of a young girl and her baby becomes even more grim and disturbing, it sets a tone for much that follows. Nothing is sensationalized – it just is. The same is true in “The Thing with Feathers,” a tale of deep pain and prevailing endurance. Hudson’s frank approach sets these stories apart, opting for humanity and truth, not sensationalism.  

The men do not always fare well in these tellings, but Hudson also creates plenty of horrendous, petty women. Often, and fortunately, raucous humor leavens the frank, no-holds-barred tone. In the story “See Ruby Falls,” a family trip conceived in sentiment becomes the worst road trip ever. Marble, the worst sister-in-law ever, is a snarling harpy for the ages. When Marble comes to an earned fate I could have never imagined, I blush at my satisfaction.  

“The Good Sister” cascades seamlessly through the lives of the good sister, “eldest of nine,” and her favorite, the Fifth Born, as each plunges, in their own way, through the strict Catholic upbringing of an earlier era. In “The Seamstress,” a comedy of Mobile society and Mardi Gras social climbing, Celeste, the title character, quietly and patiently weathers the bombast of a shrill and jealous woman and her minion as she guards her own secrets. Just deserts are just around the corner. 

A woman approaching thirty and stalking her married boyfriend realizes that she is “just before turning into a bar skank.” Hudson remembers when migraines were “sick headaches,” and a woman (who should know) comments on an acquaintance, “Once trash, always trash.” When a twelve-year-old develops a crush on a visiting preacher who looks like “Herman out of Herman’s Hermits,” she accepts “the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal Savior” on the spot for the first of several times. As a family gathers on Christmas Day, “conversations writhed in and around one another’s like reptilian hissings in a pit of stranded snakes.” A roughneck seventeen-year-old with designs on a flirtatious twelve-year-old was “calloused over so many times he was hard as stone by the time he was twelve.” These stories have tons of subtext. 

Suzanne Hudson has an assured mastery of character voices – often rowdy, raucous, and redneck – that are authentic and true. “Jesus, Sex and Sweet Tea” and selections from Hudson’s novel The Fall of the Nixon Administration feature first-person monologues that weave themselves into a larger narrative. Characters drop racist comments so casually that they almost slide by. A white girl turns ten and realizes that she can no longer play with her Black playmate.  

Hudson’s stories often tap into our most rebellious instincts. A high school librarian shoots and kills her husband, goes on the lam, picks up a teenage hitchhiker, and finally asks, “Can I go sane on you?” Two guys dealing with a septic tank installation and an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico realize that the online girlfriend who moved in is a scam artist “without much artfulness.” “I figured it was too good to last,” sighs the man who brought in the grifter.  

The collection includes two personal essays, “Writing the Mud Life,” a post-2016 election commentary, and “Hiding out with Holden Caulfield,” a pre-2011 retirement essay. “Writing the Mud Life” is often angry – with good, well-stated reasons – and wildly prescient in the wake of the 2024 election. In “Hiding out with Holden Caulfield,” Hudson lands in a middle school teaching job where she is “surrounded by crude, tasteless, base immaturity. I was home.” The tone shifts when she becomes a school counselor, and a promising student commits suicide. These essays reveal much about Hudson’s evolution as a “word worker.”  At times, while reading these essays, I was hearing from a kindred spirit – her Southern experience parallels and magnifies what many readers have lived through.  

Deep Water, Dark Horizons is a robust collection – moving and startling – with a fierce comic underside. It exposes the lies and denials that are ubiquitous within us. The essay “Writing the Mud Life” is, finally, a challenge for artists to face the truths often hidden behind the curtain. She hopes that “we’ll all clean up real pretty.” For now, Suzanne Hudson’s prize-winning writing is helping to show the way.  

 

Edward Journey, a retired university professor and theatre professional living in Birmingham, wasted an undergraduate degree in political theory. He regularly shares his essays in the online journal “Professional Southerner” (www.professionalsoutherner.com)