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 Lee Kvern
ENFIELD & WIZENTY
2025/$27.95/252 pp.

At first glimpse the plot of this fast-moving novel seems to lack promise: 1980s casinos, the last days of the Ferdinand Marcos regime, a creepy stalker called Regrettable Russell. Not my cup of chai, per se. But Lee Kvern’s perspective-shifting potboiler, with its punchy chapter titles and unexpected weavings of past and present, Manila and Calgary, assassinations and card counting, proves engaging.

The thriller begins with a sadly typical scene: the careless brutality of a murdered woman’s burial, fortunately rendered atypical via its “narration” by a grizzly bear. The book whips with caffeinated pace between 1983 Philippines, where a pig farmer is framed as the purported killer of a prominent politico, and a 1984 Cowtown casino, where one of the slaying’s witnesses, Amado, is hiding out. The novel also showcases other complex characters. These include Elle (whose daughter, feminist studies barista Jeliane, is featured in the 2017 coffee shop chapters, their fate linked by the above-noted slimeball), Moose, Erik the Dutch, Billy Jacked and The Crier. Catch You on the Flipside deftly tosses the problems of duplicity from hand to hand like a scalding potato.

The text does, however, struggle with editorial concerns. Along with typos, they include syntactical and spacing issues and odd constructions of verbs, such as a column that reaches “from the vaulted ceiling down” to the carpet, and many instances of adjectives presented incorrectly: “blue pale shirt” or “black slick hair” (the order is always qualifiers first, then colour) along with sloppy repetitions of nouns, such as she “cupped Aquino’s earnest face in her hands and kissed his smiling, laughing face.”

But Kvern’s style at its best is as taut and peppy as that found in Raymond Chandler’s detective fiction with a splash of Haruki Murakami’s deadpan delivery, especially in her depiction of characters such as journalist Ken Kashiwahara: “there were things you could not capture in a photograph… you had to be there to feel it deep in your breastbone. The guard’s bamboo flute seared Ken’s grief.” Or Lina, Rolando’s justice-questing wife: “Lina held Rolando’s pillow to her chest, his pig farmer scent embedded within [and] tried not to cry in the black morning.”

By the close of this fast-paced rollick in espionage, shoes, paid weepers, misogyny, java and blackjack, a range of shocking flipsides has been exposed, some of them even lovely ones. Most vitally, criminals are slithered towards their inevitable ends, the novel concluding with a snake’s own flipside, in a potent symbol of how nurturance can twist into murder.

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

_______________________________________

Read More from Enfield & Wizenty

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Catch You on the Flipside appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Amy LeBlanc
ENFIELD & WIZENTY
2023/$22.95/168 pp.

Pandemic texts now abound, whether overt or only suffused with the sense of unsettlement and uncertainty we’ve all experienced over the last couple of years. Amy LeBlanc’s creepy collection of modern-day ghost tales strikes an accurate tone in the face of these discombobulated circumstances. Divided into three parts that all attend to domestically gothic symbology (“fox,” “fever dream” and “body,” all in a home environment), the deceptively simple language and direct narration conceal an underground world of incessant germs, strange surgeries, omnipresent ashes and corpses, the deaths of birds and cats, and a quavering atmosphere of relentless illness and oddity.

LeBlanc possesses a facility with metaphor—“his hair was the colour of rusted nails,” “[her] jacket was a shade of yellow that reminded me of highlighters I’d bought in university but had never actually used,” “[the] baby’s lips were the colour of raspberry juice”—but often lets the details settle nakedly on the page, carving out an unheimlich order of events in a chillingly definite syntax: “She took the syringe from the fridge 30 minutes ago…. [She] pinches a bit of fat from her belly… [she] breathes in” or “Liv tightened her grip around the worm… licked her lips, looked at the watermelon boy, then lifted the worm to her mouth and dropped it straight down her throat.”

As mood is so dominant in this collection, the reader may take awhile to delve into the unyielding parade of darkness. Once the plunge is taken, the payoffs are satisfying. The best reads transform the everyday, and stories such as “Cherry Pit,” with its compelling history of mortician rituals (a story that segues into “Funeral Cloak” through the unnerving character of a lepidopterist), “The Fridge Light,” where a daughter with food issues must serve a mother a meal of Alphagetti that drops into the pot with “a sound like vomit hitting the floor,” and the final tale, “Body Fluid Spill Kit,” in which a mother must buy a “little vanilla scone” for a corpse that randomly ends up sitting in the back seat of her car, all effect that transformation. LeBlanc interposes questions, transcriptions, instructions and other forms of text within her narrations, some of which enhance the story even as others prove a bit distracting.

Amazingly, humour appears amid all the grimness, as with the banner at the bridal party that reads “SAME PENIS FOREVER!” as well as weird and thwarted moments of care between the young and the old. Homebodies is about the living who are isolated, the deceased who infiltrate our quotidian realms, and all those lacunas that quiver between—uncanny and sometimes welcome spectres of love.

Catherine Owen is an author and editor in Edmonton.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Homebodies appeared first on Alberta Views.

Edited by Darren Ridgley
and Adam Petrash
Enfield and Wizenty
2021/$21.95/160 pp.

Reading Alternate Plains is like eating your way through a tasting platter at an experimental new restaurant. Some stories will be to your taste. Some will not. Maybe you’re more interested in a raconteur’s yarn about cursed hockey skates than a self-aware YA fantasy escapade in a dusty coal town ravaged by climate change, or vice versa. There are 12 stories here, curated to showcase diverse flavours of prairie speculative fiction, and some will resonate more than others.

The most frustrating part of Alternate Plains is not the stories that leave no impression—it’s the stories that tantalize, only to end too quickly. Linda Trinh’s “Eggshells” includes fascinating references to Vietnamese mythology and a protagonist who finds a sliver of magical amber eggshell embedded in her body. Rhonda Parrish’s “Purple City” uses an iconic piece of Edmonton folk legend to explore grief and loss. These stories are beautifully written and chock full of interesting characters and settings. But they (and several others) read like first chapters of longer works, and therefore leave you feeling incomplete. This may be an effective strategy for inspiring readers to explore the author’s other works and see if there is indeed a continuation of the story in a longer form. But for this anthology it means we get many setups and few resolutions.

Nonetheless, a few standout stories work as standalone narratives. Sheryl Normandeau’s “The Slough” oozes with a dark, prairie gothic vibe, telling the tale of a demon-infested farm pond. Chadick Ginther’s “Lurkers in the Leaves” is a captivating blend of body horror and magical forest enchantment.

Wayne Santos’s “Yet Another Roadside Manifestation” combines the best of both worlds, telling a complete story—about a transdimensional being hatching from the Vegreville pysanka (egg)—that could also function as the pilot episode of a “monster of the week” TV show or a graphic novel series. It also provides a rare and palate-cleansing moment of comedy amid the otherwise mostly morbid and macabre stories.

Indeed, the collection leans more towards grim and grisly than quirk and whimsy. But within these darker tones, the editors have expertly balanced a range of genres—from hard and soft sci-fi and fantasy to ghost stories to straight horror. They have also made sure to include stories with totems of folk history that ground the book to its chosen region—from Manitoba’s Halfway Tree to Edmonton’s Purple City.

Ultimately, Alternate Plains provides an effective sample menu of fantastical stories. Some are sharp and spicy. Some are acidic and icy. And some leave you hungry for more.

—Bruce Cinnamon is the author of The Melting Queen.

The post Alternate Plains appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Lori Hahnel
Enfield & Wizenty
2020/$21.95/240 pp.

Calgary novelist and short fiction writer Lori Hahnel’s second collection of short stories, Vermin, arrives at an opportune time, when short fiction is being lauded on literary award lists. Hahnel’s newest stories dramatize a mature handling of narrative craft. The book’s epigraph from Yeats signals its preoccupations—that only “sex and the dead” are worth serious consideration. These stories track the struggles and deaths of intimates, exploring the nuanced pathology of relationships with a feminist sensibility, including in a couple of satisfying revenge stories where bad guys get their just deserts.

Although each of the 20 stories is told from a first-person, cis female point of view, this belies the ambitious range of Hahnel’s storytellers. Protagonists include the putative love interests of Tom Thomson, Frédéric Chopin, Stephen Foster and Bix Beiderbecke. Suburban moms become renegade entrepreneurs, selling (allegedly) used underwear on eBay. Young girls try to make sense of schoolyard and adult power struggles. When the preschool girl in “Ask Your Mom” learns a swear word from neighbourhood boys, her mother’s shock troubles the mystery: “I still didn’t know what it meant, but I could tell it was something bad.” A 1960s setting is deftly sketched in details, such as a reference to “the Chinaman’s” store, and in the girl’s distress when made to wear a scratchy crinoline under her dress to Sunday mass. Emboldened by this transgressive experience, the girl ignores her mother’s dinnertime summons and runs “free” with the boys. Other stories are set in contemporary Calgary, notably one in which two friends, psychoactively altered, end up drinking with the aging band at the down-at-the heels Bowness Hotel, the refuge of “bikers and career drinkers.”

Hahnel has mastered the art of in medias res openings. Glancing up from her morning paper, the narrator of “A Good Long Life” thinks she sees a row of blackbirds on the clothesline. These turn out to be black, frost-covered socks hung by the previous owner, an elderly widow, unable to let go of the past. While most of Hahnel’s endings strike a definitive ta-dah! sense of closure, the ones that worked best for me offer more haunting, minor-chord endings. The wife in “A Love Story” sees her husband talking intensely with a young woman: “I would have thought maybe he was happy,” she thinks, “but he had that same strange look on his face I’d never seen before.”

Though there is a certain structural sameness to these stories, they do not fall in the soporific company of the “earnest Canadian short stories” that cause one of Hahnel’s protagonists to nod off in mid-read. These are well-made stories that offer convincingly conflicted characters. A hospitable, entertaining read.

—Jannie Edwards is a poet, teacher and editor in Edmonton.

The post Vermin appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Katherine Koller
Enfield & Wizenty
2019/$21.95/192 pp.

No part of Katherine Koller’s Winning Chance is cynical. The 15 stories in this collection—the first from the Edmonton-based playwright and novelist—read more like the good-news piece at the end of a broadcast than the doom-and-gloom preceding it. You know the story, the one that radiates such human goodness it couldn’t possibly be true, except it has to be—it happened right down the street.

You will not meet anti-heroes here. You will, however, meet do-gooders: women who take in rough-speaking young mothers and their babies (“Belovèd by the Moon,” “The Return,” “Love, Janis”), a child who forges a friendship with an elderly woman and her handicapped son (“The Teeny Tiny Woman”), a husband and wife who, in the afterlife, become guardians of highway drivers (“M & M”). For better or for worse, Winning Chance’s down-and-out are often personified opportunities for change.

All told, Koller’s protagonists face no shortage of their own pain. Wounds of the past—unhappy marriages, deceased spouses and parents, miscarriages—make people hungry for connection and resolution in a way that feels true to life. This pain is resolved in transcendental moments of sentiment. In one story’s ending, a couple repairs their fractured relationship by reflecting on a bird bath made from their broken dishes. In another, two women plant flowers together, healing the wounds of motherhood through a literal act of rebirth. We may consider these flourishes as testaments to the redeeming power of human connection—an antidote to the more cynical norms of contemporary literature. Or, given the privilege already afforded to these characters—often homeowning, white, straight—we may consider whether the grace they receive is truly groundbreaking. The collection’s standout stories are those that complicate our ideas about who is deserving of a happy ending. “The Care & Feeding of Small Birds,” for example, believably captures the disarming aftermath of grief, laying bare the hurt we cause others when consumed by hurt of our own.

These stories punch above their realist, slice-of-life weights, thanks to Koller’s specificity and description. She pays particular attention to evoking complex worlds of the home (“the salmon-pink room where sleek Sandra had steamed him in her hot tub, hand-fed him fruits he could not name”), and these domestic portraits linger long after the first read. It would be too easy to dismiss these stories as mere antidotes to cynicism. Instead, we might see them as a challenge to acknowledge that, yes, pain is a given in all lives, but hope and redemption are too. The ingredients for near-transcendent goodness, Winning Chance urges us to believe, all exist in life as we know it.

—Kate Black is a writer in Vancouver. She grew up in St. Albert.

The post Winning Chance appeared first on Alberta Views.