by Randy Nikkel Schroeder
NEWEST PRESS
2026/$23.95/342 pp.

I’ve never read a book like Sinner’s Banquet. Randy Nikkel Schroeder has created a dark (and funny!) romp of a novel that fuses real and imagined Mennonite culture, noir tropes, Shakespearean-style insults and a deep goth sensibility.

The opening chapter drives you into the narrative at high speed with the surprise of Lethbridge, Alberta, being called “LA” and the energy of Schroeder’s similes such as “white as a peeled creamsicle.” The novel’s wild plot, which takes as many twisting turns as the protagonist’s turbocharged Cressida, involves the plight of Luke, a shunned Menno (due to adolescent sexual shenanigans in a church) now residing in Vancouver and working as a dealer, who gets on the wrong side of Serendipity Hamm, the “benzo queen,” after he tries to pull a scam. Fleeing back to his past with his doomed buddy Buddha to attend his uncle Ezra’s funeral, Luke just gets more wacko as he meets up with childhood accomplices, such as the deviously erotic Nora, and they plot revenge. I can’t give away the gory deliverance, but I must warn you, it’s intensely abject and not for the faint of gut.

The trio’s initial plan turns ever more complicated as it draws in a dastardly embalmer, a vicious gravedigger, an incipient deacon, Andy, who got the moniker Ratzy (for being a tattler), two dashing cops, a Hutterite and a nasty biker called Moby Dyck. The story recalls Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled tales, spiced with Trainspotting-style vice, with characters plucked from the mouth of The Big Lebowski’s Walter Sobchak (“I’ll dry your socks on your mother’s cross,” “I’ll make egg rolls with your foreskin.”) Benjamin Hertwig’s Juiceboxers and Susan Perly’s Death Valley also come to mind. But Sinner’s Banquet is unique, with uncommon scenes involving the history of Nazism, Dionysian cannibalism, a mysterious drug called Rumijch and the desecration of corpses. Grim, yes, but rollicking too.

The short chapters are full of clever allusions to everything from A Tale of Two Cities to Melville, insertions of Plautdietsch lingo (that “meidung” feeling), a plethora of jokes (at times repeating their “badabum” a bit too often, as when Luke inserts his “you’re a real poet” riposte with four different characters), and even some beautiful descriptions of the prairies (“the dark slopes of the Porcupine Hills and the windswept ridges of the Whaleback”). At the end of this unravelling world, Luke remains, both altered and unchanged by his brutal experiences, the entire narrative a kind of meditation on the Thomas Wolfe saying “You can’t go home again.” Sinner’s Banquet is a terrifically startling read, and putting it down, I wonder, “How am I gonna stir my butter now?”

Catherine Owen is the author of 17 books of poetry and prose.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Sinner’s Banquet appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Katherine Koller
ENFIELD & WIZENTY
2026/$22.95/180 pp.

Katherine Koller is a screenwriter, playwright, university lecturer, novelist and short-story writer in Edmonton. Earthen is her second short-fiction collection. Per the title, these pieces all connect to the natural world. The characters may be living in an ancient culture, a dystopian future or the present—they may not be human—but they all exist, commune and often suffer in connection with the earth.

The first story, “You Can Have More,” finds elderly Mavis catching a teenaged potato thief in her garden one night. The boy is as feral and hungry as a coyote, and over just a few pages, his need and Mavis’s will to meet it with her own loneliness and abundant offerings feels so primordial in its humanity that I was ambushed by tears.

There is enormous loss in these stories: bereft mothers recall lost children; a girl loses a favourite tree to a chainsaw; another is drugged at a party and nearly loses her life; a man loses his wife in a car accident; a young woman loses her hands and mothers her baby with stumps. The tone of the collection often feels elegiac, as if in sympathy with the besieged natural world. And yet there is hope, escape and renewal in these stories too.

Many of the pieces are complete stories, while others are vignettes. I found occasional shifts in point of view, deus ex machina coincidences, and unconvincing dialogue distracting at times, but the audacity and range of the writing kept me turning pages despite whatever unevenness.

Koller is masterful at scene setting with telling detail. In the story “Harvest Supper,” two catty sentences deftly convey all the disapproval a widowed mother feels toward her son’s boorish family while indicting her daughter-in-law’s lack of thrift: “As usual, Peter and his family arrived a half-hour late and placed their pinging cellphones face up beside their water glasses. The two teens, Jaylee and Jonathan, unaccustomed to bones and skin from a whole chicken, picked at their meat.”

A bumper crop of fantastical narratives comes in the final third of the collection. “Maiden of the Plains” is a story of magic and brutality rivalling the grimmest of the Grimms’ fairy tales. “The Plug” is a tight and suspenseful dystopian story of renegade human survivors fleeing an AI-managed society. “Apple Bread” is written from the point of view of a blighted apple tree with a special connection to the homeowner in whose yard the doomed tree stands. I marvelled at Koller’s imagination, skill and bravery in producing this diverse collection under the banner of the organic. As she writes in “The Plug”: “It’s a risk, all that tilling, bending, digging, patting, then watering, watering every day until something green begins to show.”

Jane Kubke is a writer in Calgary.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Earthen appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Betty Jane Hegerat
SHADOWPAW PRESS
2025/$22.99/146 PP.

Early in Betty Jane Hegerat’s new collection, in a story called “Kick,” a 14-year-old boy who is the butt of jokes at his school receives some advice from his only friend, a girl who is familiar with the spiritual traditions of Canada’s North. “You have to be a bear,” she tells him. “Nobody messes with Bear.”

Being in touch with one’s inner Bear is an idea that recurs to the reader while absorbing the 14 stories in Elephants in the Room, stories in which characters have choices to make, decisions that call for strength and are sometimes made harder because of the interference of voices from past lives.

In “You Must Remember This,” a fine story of attempted recompense, a woman remembers both good and bad advice. “Do not ever begin a sentence with ‘You should,’ ” someone once told her, which would be good advice for all of us to remember. But she is also hectored by the voice of her late husband, trying to persuade her that whatever action she takes, it is certain to be the wrong one.

Most of Hegerat’s characters, it seems, have plenty of Bear in them. They are stalwarts, people who do what needs to be done. In the story “Elephants,” however, we find the Bear theme turned upside down, with one of the two main characters being a man who insists on being taken care of… and, perhaps obviously, another being the one who does the caring. It is not one of my criteria for a story that it should move me to tears, but I might mention that one story—“A Practical Woman,” involving aging people and pets—did just that.

Although the short story is usually considered to be a single genre, it really ought to be seen as two, so differently do its longer and shorter versions work. All but one of the stories in this collection are in the shorter form, which does not mean lesser but simply different.

The longer form has been favoured by some of our greatest writers: Alice Munro, Alistair MacLeod, Guy Vanderhaeghe et al. The shorter form, however, is considered more difficult to do. Short-form writers must first of all prospect for an idea that will work in their chosen length, since not all ideas will do that.  That this challenging form continues to thrive at all is at least partly due to the encouragement of literary competitions, most of which specify low word counts.

Most stories need the extra space. But as Hegerat’s new collection proves, space isn’t everything. A good writer, if she is also a good prospector, can tell the truths that only fiction can convey, and do it compactly and with style. Good things, it turns out, really can come in small packages.

Merna Summers is an Edmonton writer.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Elephants in the Room appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Thomas Wharton
Random House Canada
2025/$35.00/272 pp.

Almost everyone loves a good dog. Most people love a good novel. Thomas Wharton’s new novel, Wolf, Moon, Dog is typeset in ITC New Baskerville, which, as we read in “A Note About the Type,” is “a cheeky nod to The Hound of the Baskervilles.” This book, inspired by fables, is itself a “cheeky nod” to the notion of a novel. It’s a compendium of tales that span the imaginary life (or lives) of a single character, a protagonist named Wolf, the first and archetypal ur-dog, who crosses the species threshold from wolf pack into human society, and then travels through time and space in an epic series of picaresque adventures. Wolf is three-headed Cerberus, and an overbred consort in a medieval court. He inspires a famed Zen koan, illuminating the nature of being; and is Laika, a Moscow street dog and first living creature to orbit the earth. Wolf is abandoned at an airport in Colombia and remains faithful, and heartbroken, until his solitary end. He is a protagonist in tales of ancient Egypt and in narratives akin to Homer, Austen and Joyce. He is companion to a famous Proustian novelist, and “something of an expert on narrative himself,” who “lives other, more memorable lives” not in evanescent memory but through his nose: “Each lamppost, tree and fire hydrant held the phrases, paragraphs and entire chapters of an ongoing saga that was his alone to read.” Through it all, of course, “There was nothing finer, he was certain, than a bone.”

In short, Wolf gets around. He’s seen and done many things. It’s a charming, flexible, capacious narrative gambit, like something from the Italian maestro Italo Calvino: an Oulipo-inspired structure or “machine” for creating stories, with the dog as Forrest-Gumpian figure who doesn’t need to run between scenes in order to pop up amidst familiar narrative styles and strategies, taking a star turn in sterling moments of historical dog-dom. Wolf is “Good Dog,” “Underdog” and “Moondog”—as chapter titles attest. He is a guard dog, rescue dog, hunting dog and a creature trained to go against instinct in chasing down humans held in bondage. He’s an unhoused dog, a dog dosed by hippies, a film star and a time-travelling avatar of speculative fiction, where in a distant future dogs work together and find “ways to help the planet heal itself.”

Wolf, Moon, Dog is a playful literary provocation, a bravura flight of research and performance that reaches for profound moments of imaginative insight. Wharton is one of Alberta’s finest writers. His 1994 novel Icefields was recently republished in a Landmark Edition by NeWest Press, and his 2023 novel The Book of Rain was an ambitious, multi-layered narrative exploring the complexities of resource extraction and climate change. Readers need to encourage writers to take risks in innovating within familiar forms, as Wharton does with Wolf, Moon, Dog. We need to reimagine our relations with non-human nature, creating a new ecological knowledge in which rivers, plants and animals are members of our communities, as Wharton does here. This is one reason we love dogs, after all. And gardens. And books that help us cross the threshold between nature and culture, which is an imaginary divide, after all.

Wharton’s writing is concise and clear, deeply imaginative and easily accessible. For these and other reasons, I wanted to like this book more. The wide-ranging fragments pulled the book apart with a powerful centrifugal force, however, such that the narrative centre could not quite hold. Standing alone, many of these stories shine. But for this reader at least, this cheeky series of fables just about refused to cohere.

Ian MacRae is an associate professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University.
_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Wolf, Moon, Dog appeared first on Alberta Views.

Edited by Alexander Finbow, Shea Proulx, Emily Pomeroy and Hartley Rose
Renegade Arts & Entertainment
2025/$29.99/176 PP.

Alberta Comics: Love is a joyful and sometimes heartbreaking anthology of 48 stories—comics and graphic narratives—from emerging and well-known artists around the province. Each piece in this slim volume is between one and five pages long, so readers get only a taste of a story before jumping into the next one. As described in the short introduction, the anthology aims to “Examin[e] ideas of what constitutes true love, reframing everything panel by panel, with no one person claiming a definitive answer.”

Each piece here is an intimate sharing of something the artist loves. Which is not to say this is a saccharine book. Romantic stories abound, such as the playful “Muse,” by Molly Receveur, or Simone Stehouwer’s achingly sweet “Rock,” but many of the comics end with a laugh, like Aaron Navrady’s about crafting a balloon dog from a condom or Eric Dyck accidentally spotting turkey vultures… erm, reuniting. There are also delightfully weird pairings—Bigfoot and an FBI agent, a computer virus and its host, a rat and a living cardboard box, to name a few.

While reading Love I discovered artists I’m now excited about. Take Hollis Parrott, for example, whose “Labour of Love” isn’t drawn but cut from layers of black and white paper. Parrott also incorporates burnt scraps of letters and bits of string that look like they could be lifted off the page. Jarret Hartnell, in “Connection Never Severed,” hand-illustrates every panel in an array of glowing colours, creating a sci-fi world in which a cosmic transformation, personal tragedy and hope for the future unfold. Across the artistic spectrum, Brianna Rose’s digitally rendered comic about asexuality, “Love in spades,” is adorable. Rose cuddles with cats, somersaults across the sun and shouts through a megaphone “I love soooo much!!”

The range of art styles is a boon in this anthology, as it makes it easy to tell where one story ends and the next begins. Only one transition confused me, where I briefly thought an elderly couple had transformed into robots. Likewise, the choice not to sort comics into thematic categories gives each piece maximum impact and prevents similar stories—such as the three or four about pets—from melding together. You never know what you’ll find when you flip the page.

Buried in the middle of the book is the deceptively simple “A Soft Memory,” by Mouse Brown. Brown perfectly captures nostalgia on a single page with captions that read “My first love,/ Although we were never together…/ …thank you for the experience.” At heart, most of the comics here boil down to this. Long lasting or cut short, friends or lovers, in the past or in a far-flung future, everyone is grateful for the love in their life.

Quin Lancaster is a writer and the circulation manager at Alberta Views.
_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Alberta Comics: Love appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Lynda Williams
GUERNICA EDITIONS
2025/$22.95/250 pp.

Lynda Williams describes the flavour of her debut short fiction collection, The Beauty and the Hell of It & Other Stories, as “what if Raymond Carver wrote feisty women.” It’s an apt comparison. Williams’s characters, like Carver’s, are bruised by life; their self-knowledge is hard wrought. But the comparison falters when you encounter Williams’s audaciously original humour. In one story, a woman’s disillusionment with life is described through her relationship with a bra. Her expectant delight as she unwraps the new bra from its delicate Victoria’s Secret tissue fades as the underwire digs into her skin and the bra sags after multiple washings. A woman clearing out her mother’s house seatbelts a statue of Jesus into the passenger’s side because she doesn’t “want there to be any confusion about who was saving whom.”

But while dark humour can open psychic distance from trauma, it has a shadow side. In “The Fault is Yours,” the narrator understands that her manic episodes supercharge her charisma: “I was sick in a way that transformed me from flat tap water into sparkling wine,” she says. Invited to speak on a panel of people experiencing mood disorders, she has her audience in stitches. She later regrets this performance, vowing she’ll perform in a circus before offering up her hypomanic episodes for entertainment.

The carefully realized architecture of these stories validates Williams’s tenacious apprenticeship to become a serious writer. She studied at MacEwan and Mount Royal universities and did a mentorship at the Humber School for Writers. In 2024 Williams won the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award. In one story the writer protagonist vows she’ll “give Alice Munro a run for her money” before she turns 30. Disturbed by her relatively uneventful young life, she sets a goal of “collecting strange experiences to weave into fiction.”

Eventually the protagonists of these stories seemed to me interchangeable, their voices similar. One story that stands out is “Miles to Inches,” centred on a brutal rape and the only story narrated in second person. Addressing herself as “you” offers the protagonist space to process her post-traumatic vulnerability. The story’s construction is brilliant: snippets of life as a distracted supermarket cashier are juxtaposed with memories of the rape and subsequent trial, and the narrator’s obsessive perusal of her used copy of the DSM, “wandering through the diagnostic criteria of its disorders as if it were a forest, the same forest where Hansel and Gretel nearly get eaten alive.” It’s been awhile since I’ve read such an original, exciting collection of fiction. Lynda Williams is a writer to watch.

Jannie Edwards is a writer and editor in Edmonton.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post The Beauty and the Hell of It & Other Stories appeared first on Alberta Views.

by C.J. Lavigne
NEWEST PRESS
2025/$23.95/176 pp.

The new speculative fiction imprint for NeWest Press, Barbour Books, comes out strongly with this remarkable novella from C.J. Lavigne, known to readers and awards committees for her excellent debut, In Veritas.

The Drowned Man’s Daughter is a fine book: rich, dark, intense, sneaky, secretly literary. On first reading I was simply lost in the strange and complex world of Naia and her cohort of generational slow-apocalypse survivors. As I read, I also wondered: does every generation of writers write the apocalypse that they have not earned but their forebears deserve

Lavigne’s narrator lives in a future world that desperately needs magic but cannot find it. Instead, magical thinking infects a tiny lost pocket of people who yearn for a way to make sense of their marginal existence. On an island, in an abandoned pre-breakdown ruin that may or may not have been a research station, a handful of survivors are locked into a strange ecosystem where sea people could be real or just a reflection from seals’ eyes in the depths. But there are definitely savage people on land who eat “moss-berries” (the reader extrapolates a world where moss has toxic berries) and give their babies to the island people to raise. Naia, however, was an infant from elsewhere, washed ashore on a disc of ancient plastic not long after a mysterious drowned man was found in the same spot, and her people are desperate for her to be a magical being who can influence the sea and the storms. Her narrative is a masterful tangle, as Naia wants to live up to the mythology even though she knows it’s not real. Still, over time, she is drawn into the mass desire for answers and salvation. Whether or not she finds those isn’t the point. The journey is not about the destination.

On rereading The Drowned Man’s Daughter I was able to get the distance to look at how Lavigne makes, or doesn’t make, this post-breakdown future alive to the reader. During the online launch Lavigne said, “I explained everything, but then it was too long, so I cut every explanation but left the descriptions and actions”—which in itself is a master-class instruction for any speculative writer. The reader must be alert to the subtle interweaving of what Samuel R. Delany called “subjunctivity”: descriptions of a world not ours, but enough like ours to deceive us, or at least lull us into false assumptions that then are shattered by a single phrase or act. For example, my favourite moment, sublime in both art and craft, places a key piece of worldbuilding—on page 108! There, Naia says, of the community elder’s death, “She had been wise and hard and kind. She had once known a man who remembered birds.”

Candas Jane Dorsey is a multi-genre author and editor.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post The Drowned Man’s Daughter appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Blaine Newton
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2025/$29.99/182 pp.

According to philosopher Byung-Chul Han, “we no longer have any narratives that provide meaning and orientation for our lives,” as storytelling in the digital age is increasingly reduced to mere sound bites of distracted and disconnected information. Reading a short-fiction collection such as Blaine Newton’s Rag Pickers might be one kind of remedy. As its title suggests, the tales aren’t bent on ambitious puffery but are instead humble—and sometimes hilarious—pieces cut from the cloth of humanity. Newton is an award-winning playwright, and his first book features characters engaging with each other in a way that now, sadly, can appear old-fashioned.

The encounters are subtle, nuanced in a way Henry James would surely appreciate, emotive with melancholic perplexity,  with characters who often appear out of place, who gaze anxiously from behind curtains, who, like the protagonist in the title story, receive cryptic and useless messages that state “I wish you were dead” concealed within a thrift store jacket lining. The longest story in the collection, “Conversations with Cows,” was a Fringe Festival play and, with its two acts, mirrors the production, in which a young couple wrestle with the shifts in their relationship occasioned by a widening gulf between the kowtowing of making corporate money and the freedom of creating art. Newton is able to impart an essential message here, but rarely with a heavy hand (though perhaps with a surfeit of accretive clauses).

Similarly to Stephen Leacock, Newton is adept with the mistaken identity plot (“Coffee Break”) and the satire (“The Reluctant Poet,” a laugh-out-loud romp in seven cantos). Although he is often funny, even down to incongruous similes, as in “The Ascent of Hank,” when the titular character compares his crush’s eyes to a “standard company-issue Bic Cristal,” Newton is even more attuned to the small gestures between the old and infirm and those assisting them as movers or carers.

Consistently, Newton makes the reader feel. Even as one is guffawing at the erasure of stick people on a divorcee’s car, one is stirred by the way the mother’s hands “that had carried the weight of the bags” were now “fists,” or the “wonderful loaf” William finally wholly accepts at the close of “Downsizing,” or the aged man who imagines himself back on the ice, shooting the puck with a boy he sees “from a distance” before realizing “Time is still and hard, the wind like a hand pushing my face away.” Han stresses that narrative can “stabilize life” with its attention to the temporal. Newton’s rag pickers hit this empathic cue: they slow us down, send us deep.

Catherine Owen is the author of Moving to Delilah (2024).

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Rag Pickers appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Carissa Halton
NEWEST PRESS
2025/$23.95/376 pp.

Revolution Songs is the debut novel of Carissa Halton, a communications consultant and keynote speaker on community development and government relations. Despite Revolution Songs being her first foray into fiction, she’s not an inexperienced writer. Halton previously published Little Yellow House (University of Alberta Press, 2018), a nonfiction account of moving to a rough, inner-city Edmonton neighbourhood. She has also published widely in magazines such as Today’s Parent and Azure and won a National Magazine Award for an article in Eighteen Bridges.

Halton brings direct language and talent as a researcher to her first attempt at fiction. Revolution Songs is a meticulously researched account of the turbulent years in the Crowsnest Pass from 1928 to 1932. Readers needn’t be put off by the two-page character list or the author’s note that sets out the book’s historical context. The novel is accessible and easy to follow despite its large cast. Halton delivers the story in short, catchy chapters, each with its own narrative arc, and readers will also learn the history by being immersed in the story. However, the endnote clarifying where Halton takes liberties and where she sticks to facts will be invaluable to history buffs. This transparency and rigorous research make Revolution Songs the perfect novel for anyone wanting an energetic, immersive tour of this region’s Depression-era history.

Halton is one of the few authors to hold a fictional mirror up to this specific region. In an old-fashioned, chronological storytelling style, she sketches the main events of the Pass with such acute attention that the place itself becomes a main character. She captures the smell of the mines, the shadow of Frank Slide, the dark days, the relentless wind, the omnipresent coal dust, the development of the local Communist party at the same time as the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, the growing support for women’s emancipation, and the constant grief and fear of families who made their living by mining coal. A character complains the smell alone would make her divorce her husband if he forced her to live in one of these miserable towns.

From the large cast, Annie Jalmer emerges as the novel’s heart. Readers focus on her as she navigates the Pass’s political conflicts, such as that between communist and fascist forces, or the rising unrest of workers. This labour unrest eventually results in a strike that provides the novel’s main plot. Though writing in largely utilitarian language, Halton creates believable, compelling characters who pull readers into the drama and lend insight, especially into the challenges of women navigating the hard mining-town life and the province’s fraught Depression-era politics. The story of the Canadian KKK gaining a foothold in Alberta is an important and timely reminder that not only can it happen here, but it has happened here—as a direct outcome of similar political polarization.

Halton’s deep research has afforded her no shortage of drama. She portrays a company that gives its employees just enough shifts that they’ll stay and labour conditions in which boys die because the “boss class” refuses to prioritize human life over their own financial interest. Despite this inhospitable working environment, desperate workers come from all over the world to this “miserable mountain pass.” Halton powerfully notes that there are many languages in the Pass, but all fail to describe the grief.

Revolution Songs might not be the book for readers who like experimental literary fiction and poetic language, but lovers of historical fiction will be hard-pressed to find a novel more packed full of drama than this one.

Angie Abdou is a professor of creative writing at Athabasca University. Her most recent book is This One Wild Life (ECW).

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Revolution Songs appeared first on Alberta Views.

Graveyard Shift at the Lemonade Stand
by Tim Bowling
FREEHAND BOOKS
2025/$22.95/275 pp.

Where would you find a lemonade stand after midnight A haunted sideshow An abandoned carnival Tim Bowling knows. The prolific Edmonton-based author uncovers these places, both bitter and sweet, in Graveyard Shift at the Lemonade Stand. It’s his first collection of short fiction, which I was surprised to learn, as the book is assured and compact and was a pleasure to read.

The collection’s first story, “The Living,” sets the tone. A teenager on a fishing trip with his parents encounters a sinister tramp, skulking along the river, whose vernacular-laced tales of adventure (plagiarized, the boy knows, from books he’s read) easily draw his father into his orbit. One of the collection’s strongest stories, it’s gothic and creepy, full of Bowling’s exacting detail (“Aunty Muriel wears her grey hair in a severe bun and is always sucking air through her teeth.”). Many other stories here feature adolescent boys presented with ethical dilemmas in which they’re either found wanting or, in an achingly sad moment, realize their parents are all too human.

“Bartleby, the Sessional” (taken after Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and originally published in Alberta Views, May 2021) follows a misanthropic, failed academic’s stumbling to success via the lows of the post-academic hustle. It’s scathing and poisonously funny, ventriloquizing Melville’s interiority and his common themes of deceit and free will (and giving some additional nods—the professor meets a student at Starbucks; poetic signifiers like “salt spray” are dotted throughout). In other hands, stories such as “Bartleby” could fall on the side of the cringe-inducing, overly satirical and sneering. It’s clear, however, that Bowling cares deeply for these characters, here and in other tales that riff on literary themes and writers—such as the John Cheever-inspired “This is a Test of the Emergency Book Buying System,” and a fable-like story, “Tidal Change,” where a blue heron transforms into a man and discovers the blessings and curses this brings, turning the pathetic fallacy inside out.

Taken as a whole, the collection reads like the work of a reader’s writer—you can feel how many authors and books Bowling has absorbed over his lifetime. Canadiana (and Americana) thread through the stories; fans of work from David Adams Richards to The Body-era Stephen King will love it. As much a truly delightful read as an exemplar of craft—and it is—the collection may be best experienced by dipping in and out, one tale at a time, though you may find that difficult to do. As the title hints at, these are stories to be gulped down and read into the late hours.

Bryn Evans is a writer and clinical social worker.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Graveyard Shift at the Lemonade Stand appeared first on Alberta Views.