Yellow Barks Spider by Harman Burns

There’s palpable tension in the spare opening pages of Yellow Barks Spider, a debut novella by Vancouver-based Saskatchewan transplant Harman Burns. Even before the story begins, a dedication—“for ██████ wherever you are” —draws any curious eye. A technique Burns revisits later, redaction—with its there/not there visibility—prompts inevitable questions: what’s the masked name and the story behind it, and why are readers simultaneously told of its existence while kept in the dark? It’s tantalizing public viewing, a private communication printed in a consumer good purchasable by anybody.  

A forceful and ultimately unmanageable tension is evident too in the story’s first handful of pages. The focus is kid, a proper name spelled in lower case that’s indicative of a junior role in a social world otherwise inhabited by grandma, mom, stepdad, neighbour, grandpa, and older cousin. 

That world appears bountiful, a playground. kid looks at photographs, joins a Johnny Cash singalong with mom and grandpa, watches snow outside the living room window, plays hockey, and makes a man-shaped figure out of plasticine. Later, on a summer afternoon “where time was meaningless,” kid (“tall but skinny, skinny as a lamb”) “kneels over the edge of the flower to see the world below. a kingdom of life is spread out there: the world swims in constant motion, bud and bloom and bug and rot all climbing and swallowing and unfolding in perfect disorder.”

Gathered together, the images seem pleasant. And yet: that “disorder.” At home, kid dreams of an ominous shed. kid dreams of spiders and wakes panicked about them infesting his body. grandma reassures kid and tells him “when you dream about spiders it means you’re changing. you’re growing up.”

Over a century after Freud wrote “the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious,” kid ponders grandma’s words and thinks “about the things he promised himself he’d forget, the things he’d promised he’d bury forever in the deepest place a memory can go. he wondered if that’s what adults meant when they talked about growing up: learning to forget.”

Despite kid’s efforts, soon “Something was being remembered.” And soon, on pages where neat lines of prose turn into staggered and frantic lines of verse: a name, Marlon, with a capital M. And adolescence. And further redacted words. By Part Two, “Kid was growing up.” Kid, now assigned a proper noun, acts out, learns of vodka and the harsh tribal laws of his teenage peers. Next, he’s left home and works in city restaurant kitchens. He’s broke, he’s lost, and he’s less and less employable after he learns of addictive street drugs and the supposed freedom they promise. 

Kid’s pronouns loosen and drift; the novella’s sentences extend and flow like consciousness; prose explodes into taut, insistent, mantra-like verse. (Part Five consists of one phrase: “It is hard to break a pattern” that’s repeated hundreds of times across four pages; solitary on the sixth page, “until the pattern is no more” subs in for an account of a harrowing and uncertain process.)

As a Bildungsroman, Yellow Barks Spider isn’t in the business of reassurances. Growing up, Kid comes to see, can be arduous, with disorder and pain and failure and confusion as prevalent as their opposites. Kid does grow up. Kid does undergo a necessary stage of unmaking and remaking. Yellow Barks Spider is hopeful in that respect. At the same time, and despite some positivity, Burns isn’t a believer in a-spoonful-of-sugar served with a ready smile. There’s memorable Gothic accessorizing in Burns’ aesthetic: 

“Kid doesn’t want to be in the dark, Kid, doesn’t want, she, to be afraid, but he’s, she’s so sick, she is sick, all of her senses are dulled and she is in the basement, the bedroom, the acid, visions fading, and she is left, bleached by chemicals, the inside of her skull stripped with paint thinner, the ugly blue pills dissolved in her bloodstream. I thought these were supposed to make me better, the ugly dark closing in again.”

Read why Harman Burns wrote Yellow Barks Spider here!

Brett Josef Grubisic

Brett Josef Grubisic resides on Salt Spring Island, BC, where he's currently at war with his sixth novel. Previous novels include The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck.