Adriana Scioli

Corinna Chong, Bad Land.

Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2024. $24.95 

Bad Land by Corinna Chong is a slow-burning novel that explores the complexity of memory and how it shapes what we believe, how we live, and what we feel on a day-to-day basis. The book ventures deeply into family trauma and abandonment in order to tell a story about how those on whom we ought to be able to rely the most can also cause us the most hurt. Chong has written a raw and emotionally intelligent story that ponders how different memories of the same childhood can be so divergent, and she submerges her characters in a storyline that forces them to face their fears for the purpose of breaking toxic generational patterns. Bad Land eloquently takes readers through the sore spots of reckoning with one’s past and the consequences of exploring this curiosity.

The novel revolves around Regina, an unconventionally offline adult whose quiet life is upended with the sudden reappearance of her younger brother, Ricky and his peculiar six-year-old daughter, Jez. After seven years of living a wilfully lonely existence in her childhood home (save for her pet bunny, Waldo), Regina’s content but solitary days are surrendered to the mystery surrounding Ricky and Jez’s arrival. When she finally builds up the courage to pierce the silence of her brother’s secrecy, Regina learns a horrifying truth about her niece that pulls her back into their lives in a web of love, animosity, guilt, and obligation; this causes her to re-examine her own childhood in hopes of helping Ricky and Jez navigate the future to avoid repeating the family mistakes of the past.

Control and redemption are strong themes throughout the novel. Bad Land roots its story in a realism through which readers are invited to observe the substantive reality of intergenerational trauma. Specifically, Chong builds narrative parallels between the way Regina and Ricky were parented by their mother, Mutti, and how Ricky engages with Jez:

How ironic that Ricky had always moaned about Mutti’s shrieking whenever he got too close to water, to the edge of a cliff, to the homeless man, to the little dog tied to a fire hydrant outside the supermarket. Richard, come, she would bark, and Ricky would purposefully move further away.

Readers begin to wonder if the pressure Jez’s parents put on her to be an overly polite, overly mature child is the same harsh expectations Ricky and Regina’s mother had put on them. And while this parallel presents a common hypocrisy among parents and how they raise their children, it also begins to reveal the wounded mother-child relationships that both Ricky and Regina come to reckon with. While Jez’s mother isn’t a present figure in the book, her parental legacy looms large and serves to explore the novel’s many questions about how we learn, what we remember, and how we reflect our parents as we begin to parent the next generation.

Chong constructs this commentary on parenthood as Ricky and Regina argue throughout the novel about the best way to bring up Jez while unconsciously wrestling with the strained memories of their own childhoods. Regina believes that Jez, still only six, needs socialization with other children, but her father believes she must stay isolated from other children to prevent another incident like the one that brought them back into Regina’s life. The more the siblings argue, the more Regina pushes to show Ricky that not every mistake or bad choice someone makes needs to define them. But the more Chong unravels the story, the more one begins to wonder if Regina’s strong empathy towards her niece is a projection of her own insecurities and fears.

Bad Land confronts a deep fear embedded into the human psyche by asking a sensitive question: What if the events of our pasts were not actually as we remember them? What if our memories are only fabricated fantasies, clouded by how we may have felt in a particular moment? Chong presents her readers with a story that moves beyond any notion of incontestable family history or shared truth. This novel shows how the traumas of our past always lurk just below the surface of each of our present-day realities; with deft storytelling, it highlights the psychologically chilling process of excavating our lives and how we think of them. Bad Land shows that, if we dig deep enough to unearth the fossils of our old selves and realities, we must then choose to either hold them up for examination in order to learn from them, or to leave them where they lie, to wither and decay, just under the surface of our day-to-day lives in the present.

ADRIANA SCIOLI

(she/her) is in her fourth year of the Honours BA of Creative Writing & Publishing at Sheridan College. She has a passion for writing essays, short stories, and op-eds. She loves watching Hollywood classics such as 12 Angry Men, Funny Girl, and Singin’ in The Rain. In her spare time, you can find her sewing, reading in a café, thrifting, or listening to her favourite music while on a hike.