Deconstructing Hunter and Prey Binaries

Writer & Editor Amanda Schroeder reviews Hunting Season from Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020

“At times, the film will lapse into the landscape of a fable. At times you are asked to shut your eyes and focus only on sounds. I hope this causes you some discomfort,” writes Julia Brennan in her debut novel Hunting Season published by Tarpaulin Sky Press. The novel takes the form of a film journal that quickly coalesces into a brutally honest depiction of trauma from the eyes of a survivor endeavoring to take the role of a passive observer.

The narrator of the novel, Anna, is a documentary filmmaker working on a new project, which shares a title with the novel. When she is developing her proposal, she admits from the outset that the film is little more than a concept, the actual content of the piece yet to be conceived. What she knows is she wants her film to examine abuse, declaring, “Hunting Season seeks to reposition and reconfigure the difficult past through privileging present day fantasies. Fantasy as a window; as a way out. As a fact...How can we talk about abuse? This is to be the film's central inquiry.”

Anna’s vagueness about the structure extends to the complexity of her relationship with abuse. Hunting Season shrewdly demonstrates that the origins of trauma are often more than the binary of hunter and prey.

The novel, for the most part, follows a non-linear timeline. The absence of chronology is a part of what makes Hunting Season so powerful at portraying the complexity of how trauma crosses between individuals and how it influences the ways we interact with one another. We are given parts of the whole story out of order, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle left to be pieced together.

Throughout the novel, Anna is in a relationship with a young man named Maxwell. Maxwell works for Anna, helping her with her film. Anna is attracted to Maxwell because of his tenderness and what she describes as his "crying potential.” She feels drawn to him, saying, “I agree to take him on because I knew when I saw him that I wanted to desire him. He reminds me of me, when I was young.”

Ostensibly, Anna takes on the role of the hunter in this relationship. Maxwell is notably younger than her and is also employed by her. But as the novel unfolds, it becomes evident that Maxwell provides Anna with needed emotional comfort. He has more power in the relationship than initially anticipated, supporting Anna as she navigates through her memories. As her film editor, he quite literally is helping her reconstruct her story of trauma, pulling together the pieces of her past that she has yet to reconcile.

A considerable part of Anna's reconciliation with her trauma revolves around her relationship with her former lover, referred to as “B”. B is introduced through a letter he has written to Anna. The letter takes on a professional tone, as B passes on some advice for her project and expresses that he misses her. As our first impression of B, we are not given much of a glimpse into his character. The next time the reader comes across him, Anna dreams B has sent her a bloody hide with letters and trinkets of their relationship pinned to them. She declares it, “...our dead record of time,” and pins it to her wall.

B’s is a skillfully and complexly written character. He readily takes on the role of the hunter but also that of the victim. He is an older man, teaching art at a university. We initially know only of his relationship with Anna, but it is revealed that he has an ongoing habit of sleeping with his pupils. He endears himself to his young, vulnerable students by providing them with mentorship and recognition for their creativity. He helps Anna find her voice as an artist and for this, she feels indebted to him. This feeling of obligation plays into the complications of the hunter and victim relationship in the novel. B used his power as her mentor to give her confidence and a clear voice.

“I remembered a younger iteration of myself, the girl he’d met at eighteen. I peered at my face in the bathroom mirror and touched the girl with the palm of my hand. That girl had been falling through a crack. He’d handed me a ladder, and the ladder was language. For that, I still felt I owed him something.”

 Despite his apparent role as Anna’s abuser, he is much more inclined to position himself as a victim. He uses his tragic background to seduce and entrap Anna, as well as the other women he sleeps with. “The way the orphan gains control is by insisting that he has nothing, so that A might offer him more.” His childhood abandonment is a mechanism to convince the young women he sleeps with that he requires their care. He is resigned to believe that he is in fact a victim. In many ways, he fits the role flawlessly.

Unlike B, Anna is reluctant to label herself as the victim, though she acknowledges that her relationship with B was full of abuse. After all, this is the pretense of her film. When on the phone with another of B's victims, she considers, “I didn’t know what to say when the woman tried to comfort me, because I felt more like a bull than anything. If I were to adopt her new terminology, I would have to concede that I was on the phone with a victim, living below a victim, in a victim’s body, on a floor mattress.”

Anna’s detachment from her trauma can be prescribed to her position as a documentary filmmaker. Anna is meant to look at her subject with objectivity. The novel is written in the first person from Anna’s point of view, except for when she is documenting her film, including her history with B. In this sense, she takes on the role of the observer. Anna uses this position, as the documentor, to look at her trauma from a distance. Through this process, she opens it up with unmerciful frankness.

Hunting Season is carnal and often bitter. The prose is poetic and romantic, and at times shockingly vulgar. Ultimately, Anna gets her wish. At times the novel dives into such discomfort, there is a visceral urge to look away. It analyzes the complexity of trauma with brutal honesty, peeling away the skin to show us how it manifests on the bodies and in the minds of its survivors.

Amanda Schroeder is from Utah but is currently based in San Francisco, California. She has a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Utah and her work has appeared in Cathexis Northwest Press, The Crack the Spine 2019 Anthology, Sonic Boom and others. She is the co-founding editor of F3ll Magazine and currently serves as the web editor for Split Lip Magazine.