David Huebert’s debut novel, Oil People, is a petro-mythic parable for our times. Part historical fiction, part eco-horror, Oil People traces the blurry boundary line between oil and blood, between one timeline and another, between climate catastrophe and rebirth. Alternating between 1987 and 1862, the two narratives slowly dissolve and seep into one another much like the creaturely characterized bitumen and jerker lines which punctuate the Southwest Ontario landscape. In 1987, the novel follows the story of 13-year-old Jade Armbruster who begins to unravel her family’s complex past alongside grappling with her own personal desires, all while dealing with the hallucinatory residues of a feud that runs as deep as the oil on which their property sits.
In 1862, we meet Clyde Armbruster and Arlyss Mayweather, two feuding tycoons, reminiscent of the rivals, Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh during the paleontological “Bone Wars.” These two men inhabit what will become the birthplace of commercial oil production in North America. As Clyde continues “leaping on the treadle to grind the iron head of the spring pole into the rock,” Lise, his wife, remains, slowly poisoned by the landscape, asking for nothing more than a home with a basement and a child—two desires that the landscape of Oil Springs will simply not allow.
Fast forward to 1987 and Jade’s father is fixated on selling their derelict property, the same property owned by Clyde and Lise, and moving to Kill Devil Hills, though Jade’s mother refuses to sign away the land and its secrets. Jade rummages about their home, now turned Petroleum Legacy Museum, finding Lise’s journal, shards of a seemingly distant past, jagged pieces telling a story, crude and confused, of love, infertility, and greed.
The language of this novel is rich and iridescent. Every sentence is charged with the notion of a grand mystery and the echoes from the black ether of the Earth’s core. Huebert writes,
Nothing else smells like oil...Because there’s smoke and then there’s smoke when you smell plastic or diesel burning, you know it right away. If all smells, being invisible, are ghosts, then this odour is an inbred phantom, a wrong-made body whispering the ballad of wasn’t meant to be.
and it is exactly these wrong-made phantoms that Oil People is interested in, the scent of wrongness which comes to represent a kind of rupture in time. Throughout the work characters afflicted by oil often experience premonitions of ancient creatures, whales “in a place that light had never touched. Whales in the deep-down, far deeper than sight or smell, deeper than the gouge of bits and rigs” or insects crawling from one’s mouth “chanting: buried things remain.”
By the novels end “neither [...] was unique. It was simply that the hidden had come to light. The chemicals were seeking each other, fusing together, gaining strength and power.” Here, through Huebert’s deft prose, it is as if the molecules themselves have gained agency, the chemical principles which govern their behavior becomes a kind of personality, a kind of ancient motive that is slowly revealed as the novel progresses.
Just as the oil extracted from the Earth represents a fracture in time, so too do the characters in their respective timelines. At points Clyde Armbruster has a vision of a young girl with an odd pupil holding a key, bearing semblance to Jade. And for Jade there is always the image of Clyde’s statue and as well as his frequent presence in her dreams. These sequences are believable as the novel works to build an understanding of the mystical impact that long-term exposure to oil has on the novel’s characters. We toggle between timelines, between the real and surreal such as when Jade states, “I saw it sweep green through the water, a liquid borealis. I knew enough to know that it was not ghost, but memory.” A great deal of this book deals with the elision between haunting and heritage, both our familial heritage as well as our evolutionary and chemical heritages. The novel shimmers between these perspectives, alluding to oil as a direct tap to our ancient past.
Huebert’s adroit handling of scientific detail conveys this idea in a way that is human, that is not cold and static but critical to the lives and experiences of these characters. Every moment in this novel is charged by the knowledge that this landscape is poisoned, that the rupturing of time and the black liquid seeping through the cracks of that rupture are polluting the river, the water, and the very air that these characters breathe. In a recent interview with CBC, David Huebert stated
‘I would like to think of oil as an animated creaturely presence in this novel. One of the ways that it creeps into the characters is through their bodies, through disease, through rot. It also creeps into the landscape and some of the animals around them in this way as well’
Huebert also noted the massive way oil affects our understanding of time — and how that plays into the dual timelines in Oil People. In the novel, Jade asks “Might it be possible that oil bends time, warps worlds?” It is a question supported by a plethora of sequences in the novel where a character’s mind drifts to thoughts of the prehistoric animals which compose the black ooze they are now pumping into barrels for fuel, or when Lise recalls the geologist who had come to the visit the property whose smell, if she could bottle it, would be called “elsewhere,” how he said
...about the past, how it lives in the rock. He had said of the oil, that it distills time, curves it. How when you burn it, you are burning time, years. Borrowing years and centuries, and the time around you will shrink and tarnish.
What is touched on here is an understanding of oil as a what philosopher Timothy Morton describes as a hyperobject: an entity or concept so vast in temporal and spatial scale that it eludes full comprehension. According to Morton, climate change/global warming, nuclear waste, even the internet, are all forms of hyperobjects. A hyperobject is something so multivariable and vastly affecting that we struggle to pinpoint it to a single observable object. For the geologist and for Lise, oil is much more than a fuel source, it is a toxin, a tangible representation of all the past organisms of the planet, and a manifestation of vast geological time compressed into a viscous ether.
A novel not only interested in time and the damage caused by petrochemicals, it expands further, highlighting the voices of women, indigenous peoples and the landscape itself as so many of these characters have been written out of the long history of oil. Oil People deftly places these characters in the spotlight as, “All stories in the end are about mothers, sisters, and blood.: The novel spends considerable time exploring the difficult and complex history of indigenous peoples and how they were forced off of their own land for the extraction of oil and other resources, framing these actions as a continuation of colonial exploitation. Through the voices of characters such as Val and Lise, the novel emphasizes the cultural loss and disparity that parallels ecological destruction.
Huebert utilizes excerpts from Scientific American and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species as well as a fictitious museum screenplay and newspaper article telling the story of the birth of commercial oil production. These hybrid entries alongside the novel’s dual narratives function to create a holistic work that does for our understanding of the lithic and petrological what Richard Power’s did for logging and deforestation in The Overstory.
The novel shows us that for ‘oil people’, there is no such thing as fresh start, certainly not toxicologically speaking. The oil is quite literally in their blood, haunting their heritage all the way back to the 1800s when Clyde and Arlyss would bathe in bitumen. The river contains a blob of petrochemicals and recurring images of Jade’s mother’s blackened teeth and deteriorating health remind us of the unseen pathways that this darkness moves.
What is most impressive in this novel is Huebert’s ability to meld the science of toxicology, petrology, and geology with lyrically vivid sequences of hallucinatory prose. We witness the slow degradation of character’s minds from the chemicals which in many ways could be understood as the creatures that came before us talking through oil. It is the collision of the past with the present, an irreconcilable rupture that Jade, Lise, Clyde, Arlyss and all inhabitants of the Anthropocene are left to confront. In this exploration of humanity’s petrochemical legacy, the novel asks us, as Arlyss asked Clyde, “‘You ever think down?’… ‘Real deep? Like think right down into it?’”. Huebert’s novel invites us to rethink our relationship with time, the natural world, and consider both our near and distant past.
Anastasios Mihalopoulos is a Greek/Italian writer living in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He received his MFA in poetry from the Northeast Ohio M.F.A. program and his B.S. in both Chemistry and English from Allegheny College. The winner of the 2024 Prism Review Poetry prize, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Scientific American, Ninth Letter, Fairy Tale Review, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of New Brunswick.