THERE IS NO ESCAPE. Review by Delia Rainey

There is no Escape.

Stories by Samantha Sewell

Review by Delia Rainey

Samantha Sewell has a film on her website about looking at trash on the street. Maybe Sewell uses her art to pay attention to wasted memories, to people who feel like flapping plastic. 

THERE IS NO ESCAPE. (Mother Mercury, 2024), Sewell’s first book, is a collection of seven stories about the passing of time, and specifically the horror of it. In the title, ESCAPE is punctuated with a period, a signal of entrapment. There’s a faded green photo of a girl on the cover image, lying on a bed or hanging upside down. Her dark hair is leaking out, mouth and eyes and arms open, reaching upwards. In my own mouth, I feel a sound: “AHH!” THERE IS NO ESCAPE. The briefness of the collection matches its theme of time running out. Most of the stories are from the point of view of a protagonist waiting for the future yet not knowing how to “desire her own becoming.” Of all the book’s narratives, one thing is for sure: everyone is slowly dying. 

Given Sewell’s background in film writing, I want to relate THERE IS NO ESCAPE. to the experience of watching a chain of short films, starring bikini-clad moms, old people making strange comments, and young women kneeling in the shower until they bleed. I read this book in just a couple sittings, like a gossip portal into other people’s mundane anxieties. Sewell has mastered the balance of creating a story that is light-hearted and fun to read, sometimes even cringey, yet nailed in by bigger questions of human life. 

“The idea of crying has become very glamorous to Raquel,” Sewell’s first story begins, after a preface chapter listing off the attributes of people trying to rearrange themselves. These people in Sewell’s chapters are often in their minds imagining “the idea” of something, but not able to reach it. “The idea” needs a placeholder in the physical world to project itself. Powerful story shifts happen in the most banal objects: a breastfeeding pump, water shoes, a car door, a red onion about to spoil. How long until the rotting begins? The waiting feels oddly excruciating. Is something big about to happen, and even scarier, what if that big thing passes us by? 

THERE IS NO ESCAPE. can feel like a series of waiting rooms, like measuring cups for the sticky substance of dread: waiting for a daughter to call, waiting for a neighbouring boy to grow up, and noticing death engraved in the small actions of parents. The book is also very funny. A stranger repeats “I am French”, a husband’s spit sounds like a ticking clock, and there is a misunderstood boner. One narrator imagines a world where men breastfeed at hotdog eating contests. Sewell is aware of the thoughts and unique quirks of each character, and how they choose to converse with people most close to them and those on the fringes. 

This book is constantly aware of age. The young reckon with the old, and the old reckon with the young, seeing themselves in each other, and not knowing what their roles are: who takes care of who? There is a revulsion in aging yet a yearning for the comfort of stabilized time. One of the only romantic obsessions in the collection is towards a cooler and younger best friend, who also has an “old-movie” way of interacting with the world. Youth and oldness must commingle, the only way to tolerate our lifelong selfhood. Old buildings in the neighborhood become new storefronts, but the old storefronts’ memories linger like ghosts. 

Each story is told in third-person until the very last piece, “Me and You (and Everyone Else)”, a stand-out of the collection. As the prose satisfyingly switches to the “I”, the first-person invites the reader to settle into the scenery and time-anxiety as if it were their own. I (“I”) trace the thoughts and insecurities of a narrator obsessed with cigarette butts and treks for cigarettes and then cigarette-induced barf. She realizes she can feel useful in her time by filling up a Target bag with trash on her way home. At the end of her collecting, as the lid to the dumpster closes, suddenly the pink sky reveals itself ahead. The universal indicator of a day passing, the sunset. She (“I”) thinks, “Trash lasts almost forever.” After people expire, their discarded scraps still hang on. Maybe that is kind of terrifying and hilarious: we can truly never leave this earth.