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.
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