Debra Spark: Border Guard Fabulism in Stuart Dybek’s “Hot Ice” (July 2001)

Fiction writer Debra Spark examines Stuart Dybek’s short story “Hot Ice,” focusing on how the story uses fabulism—a form of magic realism in which fantastical elements are placed in an everyday setting—to walk the line between real and imagined worlds and achieve “magical, almost visionary effects,” high lyricism that hovers at the border between the living and the dead. While exploring how this particular story is made, Spark also considers “Hot Ice” in the context of Dybek’s larger body of work.