Berkley Wendell Semple
THE dozen stories in Harold Bascom’s new collection, Love and New Road, offer a richly varied reading experience, one filled with surprise, humour, sadness and emotional depth. Although the stories differ significantly in tone and genre, a poignancy unites them that lingers long after the book is put down.
Take “Sprinkler”, a moving riches-to-rags story in which the ravages of drug addiction do not so much end a life as condemn its protagonist to a prolonged existence of psychic anguish and despair. The story recalls James Baldwin’s classic “Sonny’s Blues” (1957), where addiction eclipses brilliance and devastates family relationships. Like Baldwin’s story, “Sprinkler” explores addiction’s emotional fallout through the lens of familial love and loyalty. It is also a deeply affecting love story, one whose emotional resonance haunts the reader long after its conclusion.
By contrast, “The Followers” is a compact macabre tale in which the boundary between the living and the dead appears almost non-existent. Here, even the afterlife cannot deprive one of the pleasures of fandom. Strange and quietly unsettling, it demonstrates Bascom’s gift for finding the extraordinary within the ordinary.
Humour is another defining feature of the collection, though it is rarely broad or boisterous. Instead, Bascom favours a dry, deadpan humour that invites readers to laugh at situations that are simultaneously tragic and absurd. It is the uneasy laughter that comes from recognising the ridiculousness embedded within human trauma.
This comic sensibility reaches one of its finest expressions in “Screaming Smooth”. Like “The Followers”, the story draws upon horror conventions, blending the supernatural with the surreal. Its premise is deliciously bizarre: during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kevin’s mother removes her protective mask only to discover that her face comes off with it. In this strange world, discarding the mask literally means discarding one’s identity. The conceit is both shocking and brilliantly funny. In only a few pages, Bascom achieves a remarkable fusion of horror, satire and social commentary. The story captures with startling economy one of the defining psychological realities of the pandemic: that, for a time, the mask became inseparable from the face itself. It is an inspired metaphor, executed with wit, precision and impeccable comic timing.
One of the collection’s greatest strengths is its willingness to move effortlessly between genres, often subverting their conventional expectations. “Reciprocity” is perhaps the most traditional story in the volume. Sentimental and overtly moral, it revolves around the idea suggested by its title: kindness eventually returns to its giver. Although it is arguably the least innovative piece in the collection, it succeeds as a contemporary homage to the classic O. Henry story, particularly “The Gift of the Magi”, with its carefully engineered irony and satisfying final revelation.
Other stories occupy entirely different emotional terrain. “Rebirth” is a violent and unsettling tale of revenge and, quite literally, rebirth. Told in sparse, economical prose, it transforms a familiar supernatural premise into something genuinely disturbing. Readers are unlikely to think about newborn babies in quite the same way afterwards, for in Bascom’s fictional universe some infants have lived before and have returned with unfinished business and vengeance on their minds. Set in Guyana, “Rebirth” employs Guyanese Creole with remarkable authenticity. Bascom wisely confines the dialect largely to dialogue, preserving its rhythms and colloquialisms without sacrificing readability. Throughout the collection, language marks identity and belonging.
The stories move comfortably between Guyana and the United States, particularly Georgia, New Jersey and New York, creating one of the anthology’s central concerns: the complicated relationship between the Guyanese diaspora and its adopted homeland. These encounters are rarely straightforward or harmonious.
“Gam”, set in Brooklyn, offers a quietly incisive example of these cultural negotiations through the failed romance between a Guyanese woman and her American date. Their differences emerge almost immediately, and what begins with promise gradually collapses under incompatible assumptions and expectations. It is, ultimately, a love story about what might have been.
A similar tension informs “The Comebackee”, in which a Guyanese immigrant returns home pretending to have achieved greater success abroad than he actually has. The story captures a familiar reality within Caribbean immigrant culture, where migration to the United States is often equated with inevitable social and economic advancement. To return “home” without visible signs of prosperity is frequently regarded as failure. Bascom understands these pressures well, and the character’s deception emerges less from vanity than from the heavy expectations imposed by family, community and the mythology of the American Dream. Beneath its humour lies a profoundly sad meditation on aspiration, disappointment and identity.
The story finds a thematic companion in “The Thermostat”, an astute workplace drama about office politics, misinformation and race. It is among the collection’s most intellectually ambitious stories, examining the complicated politics of language through the use of the N-word. Bascom avoids simplistic moralising, instead exploring how a racial slur carries with it the weight of history regardless of the speaker’s intentions. While contemporary debates over reclamation have complicated the word’s meaning within Black communities, its historical association with racial degradation continues to shape its reception. The story also highlights the severe social and professional consequences that may follow when non-Black speakers use, or are even accused of using, the epithet. In doing so, Bascom offers a subtle meditation on race, power, language and the politics of offence in contemporary America.
There is also much to admire in the title story, “Love and New Road”, one of the anthology’s longest and most satisfying narratives. It captures adolescence with remarkable authenticity, particularly the emotional turbulence and exhilarating uncertainty of first love. Expansive in scope, the story recreates numerous aspects of Guyanese childhood while conveying that uniquely adolescent feeling of being overwhelmed by emotions one scarcely understands. It is among the emotional centres of the collection.
The anthology is further distinguished by its memorable female characters. Bascom possesses an impressive ability to create women who are psychologically convincing, resilient and wholly believable. Dr Green and Beulah Klass, in “The Vat”, are especially compelling. They are survivors whose quiet endurance gives the story much of its emotional weight. Equally noteworthy is Bascom’s reliance on dialogue. His characters move naturally between Guyanese Creole and Standard English, and conversation frequently carries the burden of characterisation and plot development.
The dialogue possesses an ease and authenticity that brings these characters vividly to life. At close to 80 pages, “The Vat” functions less as a conventional short story than as a novella, providing the collection with one of its most substantial and fully realised achievements. It has some of the strongest female characters in the collection; this gruesome murder mystery, with ties to a historical massacre in the bush of Guyana, is wonderfully realised, a heartbreaking piece of tragic horror.
Taken together, the stories in Love and New Road reveal Harold Bascom to be a writer of considerable versatility. Equally comfortable with realism, horror, satire, romance and social commentary, he consistently finds the human drama beneath the extraordinary. Whether writing about immigration, race, first love, addiction or the supernatural, Bascom combines humour with compassion and imaginative invention with emotional truth. The result is a collection that is as entertaining as it is affecting, from one of the enduring voices in contemporary Guyanese and Caribbean literature.
