In his essay “The Monster Mash,” David Sedaris recalls, as a child, repeatedly exhuming the bodies of dead hamsters and guinea pigs. His motivation for grave-robbing? A genuine aesthetic interest in what his dead pets’ corpses looked like in various stages of decay. As gruesome that sounds, adolescent fascination with death is, as Sedaris points out, not all that uncommon. “At that age, death is something that happens only to animals and grandparents, and studying it is like a science project, the good kind that doesn’t involve homework.”

A similar unshackled attitude about death is at work in Laura Boudreau’s debut short story collection, Suitable Precautions. Most of Boudreau’s characters’ lives have been shaped by the deaths of others, the operative word here being “others.” Death, in Suitable Precautions, happens to a father we barely knew, the former owner of our house that we never met, the drowning victim we read about remotely in a newspaper account. In this way, Boudreau employs death as a deceptively simple foil; her characters come alive because they are not dead. And rather than use the abundance of death in her stories to create a dark or morose ambiance, she does the exact opposite. Like a child who inevitably finds a way to amuse herself at a funeral parlour, Boudreau’s writing is playful and oftentimes fearless.

“The Dead Dad Game,” which won the 2009 PRISM International Short Fiction Contest and was included in the 2010 Journey Prize Anthology, practically laughs at death with its title alone. Told from the point of view of a child, Elaine, who has barely any memories of her deceased father, “The Dead Dad Game” takes shattered lives and makes playthings of the pieces. In “The D and D Report” (the “D and D” standing for “Dead and Deader”), a pool manager keeps his lifeguards alert to potential dangers on the job by “bringing in articles about people dying, or almost dying, in swimming pools, usually after doing something stupid.” One such D and D Report serves as fodder for a persuasive personal essay that one of the lifeguards writes as part of a successful application to medical school; one person’s death improves another person’s life. Adolescent Luke, in “Way Back Road,” is surrounded by death, stuck at a funeral with relatives and neighbours only too happy to offer up morbid counsel and anecdotes. Though worse tragedies abound, Luke’s main concern is evading the avenging fists of the bully Shel. When Shel crumbles in the face of his own personal misfortune, Luke resolves to stop being afraid, of Shel and of dying.

Laura Boudreau writes with an uncomplicated style and displays a penchant for creating moments that are simultaneously weird and tender. In “The Vosmak Genealogy,” Dora, while scouting a psychiatric facility for her ailing mother, recounts “I remember seeing a man in a paper gown masturbating in the hallway. We stayed for lunch.” In the excellent “Poses,” Boudreau captures all the swagger and confidence of a precocious twelve-year old girl who, in her own mind at least, knows what the hell she’s doing. “I can tell you that by the time I’m seventeen, I’m not going to be slicing salami for picky moms in stretch pants.” We are happily lured by this child’s wise and hopeful tone, the seemingly limitless possibilities before her, right up until the story’s final, piercing sentence. Here, Boudreau proves to be a master of manipulation.

Laura Boudreau’s first offering is an excellent, memorable debut. And for a short story collection so full of death, Suitable Precautions is indisputably alive.

Mark Paterson is the author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers. His story “Something Important and Delicate” won the 2010 3Macs carte blanche Prize.

WOOKIEE BROWN

Remember the Christmas when you got into Mom’s purse? They caught you in the closet, lipsticks and keys and coins and tissues on the floor, encircling you like a wreath. You were building a little pyramid of pills, your fingers chalky with pink dust.

“What did you eat?” the nurse demanded. You didn’t answer. “What did it taste like?” I was sitting next to you on the examining table because I’d screamed until they’d let me. We were drawing on the crinkly white paper beneath us with one crayon each. I’d convinced you to take the stubby brown one (“Whoa. This is Wookiee brown.”) and took the newer-looking red one for myself.

“What did it taste like?”

You looked up from your picture and said pepperoni like it was a question and Dad giggled, clamped a hand over his mouth. “How many did you eat?” One hesitant hand holding up four fingers. Then five. Then two. Then one finger up your nose, excavating. Dad cracked up. “This is no laughing matter,” the nurse scolded. “This child could die.”

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing was playing in the corridor when they dragged us out of there by our hands. I pointed at the speaker in the ceiling, a perfect circle of perforated dots, but you weren’t listening. Remember you fell in the parking lot and ripped the knee of your snow pants? That’s when they noticed you didn’t have your mitts but Mom said I’m not going back in there.

You sure loved pepperoni. I ate that red crayon on the ride home.

THE GROUCH AND JONAS GRUMBY

Remember the Christmas when your present was an Oscar the Grouch finger puppet and mine was a Skipper from Gilligan’s Island action figure? We filled a big bowl with Rice Krispies, called it quicksand, and made them sink in it. The arm of the couch was a cliff and we made them fall off. It was an inspired idea, you had, to make the toilet tank Oscar and Skipper’s secret sewer hideout, but I dropped the top of the tank on the floor, it was a lot heavier than I thought it was going to be, and it broke into two pieces and that was that for that Christmas.

HALVES

Remember the Christmas when we moved? It was minus-twenty and we ran out of boxes and Mom pulled out the kitchen drawers and we carried them one by one to the car and dumped their contents into the trunk. Remember your feet got so cold that Mom sat you on the edge of the tub with your feet soaking in hot water? She told me to stay with you and good thing, too, because you fainted, fell backwards, and I caught you. You woke up and you were screaming and your nose was running and Mom gave you a Children’s Aspirin and we got in the car and drove. Mom looked small behind the wheel but then she moved the seat up. I thought she was going to take you to the hospital again but we went to McDonald’s. The manager was wearing a pointy green elf hat with a bell on top that jingled as he walked back and forth behind the counter. We had cheeseburgers and glasses of water. You and I got extra because Mom split her cheeseburger in half and then split one of her halves in half. She placed those two smaller pieces on our flattened, yellow cheeseburger wrappers. My extra had the pickle in it.

MINT EXTRACTIONS

Remember the Christmas we spent at Roger’s? He gave us each a slim box of peppermint patties. Like miniature hockey pucks with bumpy chocolate tops and smooth chocolate bottoms. A white goo inside that made our breath feel cold. You hated the mint but you liked the chocolate. You had one of your two front teeth and you were so meticulous, biting the top off a patty. You scooped out the mint with a sweep of one finger and then you ate the bottom. You did that with your whole box, The Sound of Music on the black and white TV in Roger’s basement, and you wiped the mint extractions on the walls. On the drive home Mom said you’d deserved that slap but she hadn’t and that’s why she was mad at you.

G.I. JOE AND FROZEN DEAD TAUNTAUNS

Remember the Christmas when Dad came back? He had grown a beard and shaved his head to stubble. Mom laughed and rubbed his scalp and called him G.I. Joe. He had two green Krazy Karpet sleds in one arm, a paper bag of groceries in the other. Dragging our sleds, we marched down the hall, following Dad’s snowy boot-prints to the kitchen where he said ta-da! and from the grocery bag produced a lobster. It was suspended in water inside a transparent plastic bag that looked about to burst. Brown and alive, slow motion antennae probing and seeking, it had pink rubber bands wrapped around its claws. You cried when Dad told you the lobster wasn’t a pet and you locked yourself in the bathroom when you found out it was dinner. You came out when they promised not to eat it and they sent us outside with our sleds to wait for Dad to take us to the hill. We walked around and around the house, our legs sinking into the snow past our thighs, pretending we were stranded on Hoth and our tauntauns were frozen dead. We kept our eyes to the sky for signs of a rescuing snowspeeder.

We rang the doorbell to ask when were we going to the hill and they kept saying soon and after a while they just stopped answering the door. When the sun was gone we decided to try the snowbank out front. The ride down was short and bumpy but the road was icy enough for us to make it all the way into the driveway across the street. The neighbour stormed outside and escorted us back home and rang the doorbell and we told him they’re not going to answer that but he banged on the door until they did.

“Do you have any clue what your kids are doing? In the dark?”

Dad, his lips greasy, a plaid tea towel tucked into his V-neck like a bib, said, “Do you have any clue what I’m going to do to you if you don’t get out of my sight?”

You saw it first, clutched in Dad’s hand, the lobster’s red claw, the rubber band gone, and you ran, wailing, and we drove around looking for you forever. We finally found you in the playground at our school, sitting at the top of the slide that, because of the snow, was half its usual height. The front of your scarf was stiff with frozen saliva. They said you were definitely on the naughty list.

The next morning Dad was gone again but he’d left the Karpets behind.

RÉPONDEZ, S’IL VOUS PLAÎT

The dépanneur across the street from my building sells boxes of Rosebuds. They’re smaller than peppermint patties but they don’t have any mint inside.

I’m thinking about putting them in a bowl.

So, if you’re not doing anything, could you – would you – come over for Christmas?

Mark Paterson is the author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers. He is a past winner of the 3Macs carte blanche Prize and Geist’s Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest.

Among the many charms that made Once, Rebecca Rosenblum’s 2008 debut, such an outstanding book, was the way the author wrote about jobs. From a fruit factory to a hotel laundry, from an IT department to a bookstore, Once was filled with genuine, vivid observations of the world of work, capturing both the loathing and the grudging affection for the things we do to pay the rent.

But whereas Once featured a grab-bag of jobs, the focus of Rosenblum’s second collection, The Big Dream, is on office work. These thirteen stories are linked by a single employer: Dream, Inc., a lifestyle magazine publisher. Besides the hallways and cubicles and cluttered lunchroom refrigerators, the characters in The Big Dream are also connected by the pursuit of balance; balance between work and family, work and lovers, ex-lovers, health, and everything else that makes up a life.

Balance, of course, is subject to interpretation, and Rosenblum presents a variety of circumstances from story to story. In “Dream Big,” Clint has come to the end of his post-hire probationary period but, due to a series of administrative oversights, hasn’t been made a permanent employee yet and, just as importantly, hasn’t been added to the company’s group insurance plan. Lest he jeopardize his impending status upgrade, he accepts any and all overtime requests. The need for dental work to treat a persistently aching wisdom tooth only increases Clint’s willingness to comply. This puts him in a bad spot with his girlfriend, Virgie, who complains his work is interfering with “real life.” Dejected, Clint suggests that work, in fact, is real life.

The other side of this coin is Laurence Brunswick, sixty-six years old and recently retired, who, in “Sweet,” uses work to avoid real life. Unaccustomed to so much free time and recovering from knee surgery, Laurence is not adapting well to his new situation. He finds purpose and self-worth, however, in the email consultations he continues to provide some of his former colleagues at Dream, Inc. A trip overseas that his wife plans to visit their son, daughter-in-law, and newly born grandson only represents more chaos and uncertainty for Laurence. His consultation work turns into a convenient excuse; he insists he must remain behind to help “the boys at the office.” Left to his own devices, though, Laurence finds it more difficult than ever to order his life. An errand his wife leaves for him – to deliver a pie to elderly neighbour Corey Carbone – provides some direction and as well as some unexpected, if crabby, camaraderie.

Rosenblum is an entertaining master of minutia. She has a prodigious ability to take ordinary details and restyle or adorn them in just the slightest way, transforming the mundane into the eccentric. The stories in The Big Dream come alive with orange-juice stained pillows, Zellers jeans, and jam sandwiches. And while on the subject of jam sandwiches (for which this reviewer, in the interest of full disclosure, wishes to declare a particular affection for), Rebecca Rosenblum is one of literary Canada’s funniest food comedians. A jam sandwich, we learn, isn’t “a real sandwich, just bread with red.” Delicious. Rosenblum also displays impressive, encyclopaedic knowledge of pre-packaged, processed food products, her characters’ diets supplemented by the likes of Crackerz’n’cheze, pudding cups, Craisins, Snackwiches, and Lunchables. They may not eat like gourmets, but we discover they do have some standards. In “After the Meeting,” a recently laid off Dream worker with budget concerns is willing to lower himself to domestic beer and pizza from “this Iranian place by the highway,” but steadfastly refuses to buy generic Jos Louis because (well, obviously) “Metro brand is shit.”

Communication, understanding, and perception are themes Rosenblum began to explore in Once and takes up again in The Big Dream. In “Dream Big,” Clint’s throbbing tooth diminishes his ability to speak clearly, compounding his aforementioned complications at work and in his life outside it. In “Complimentary Yoga,” call centre employee and native Russian speaker Grigori is in trouble because his limited English skills not only cause him to fail at his job, but also to misread the intentions of his supervisor – and object of Grigori’s affection – when she repeatedly summons him to her office to discuss his performance. “Loneliness” deals with a communication failure of another kind, when two people want the same thing – namely, each other – but struggle to find the words or opportunity to make it happen. This story, incidentally, contains the most interesting erotic sentence I’ve come across in some time. It’s a brilliant, short sentence that is at once passionate, hilarious, and wonderfully odd. I’ll not spoil it by quoting it here, but I will say that it involves a common form of ID.

The Big Dream features, naturally for a collection focused on work, an ample supply of interactions between colleagues, between bosses, and between colleagues and bosses. Rosenblum’s natural timing and ear for dialogue helps her to manage potentially unwieldy scenes involving groups larger than two. Some of the book’s strongest stories, while still in Dream, Inc.’s orbit, are stories in which family groups play a major role. Readers of Once will recognize Theo and Rae and their children, young Jake and the blind baby Marley, who reappear in “Waiting for Women” and “Cheese-Eaters.” This is the family post-breakup, juggling childcare and all of its particulars between separated parents. “This Weather I’m Under” is a touching look at a family dealing with the imminent death of one of its members. It’s told from the perspective of Belinda, Dream Inc.’s busy and stressed out HR director, who finds herself back beneath the sway of family after a period of self-imposed distance from her mother and sister. “The Anonymous Party” is a heartfelt story of a love relationship in its infancy, but also includes a marvellous family breakfast scene that, in relatively few words, suggests so much history and so many intricacies that it would be no great surprise to see these characters revisited in a future Rosenblum story or stories. The same can be said for “Sweet.” While a comprehensive short story on its own, and in my opinion the collection’s best, “Sweet” possesses great breadth and depth outside of the linear line Laurence Brunswick follows to bring a pie from his house to Corey Carbone’s. For a writer with a propensity for reusing, with success, her characters, “Sweet,” like “The Anonymous Party,” hints at something more in store.

In taking on office work as a theme, The Big Dream thoroughly succeeds, and it does so with both humour and heart. Just as significantly, however, is the fact that these are contemporary stories. In their characters, situations, and settings, readers will find several recognizable aspects as well as ones that are, though no less authentic, more unfamiliar. It’s this melding of the two that contributes to a larger conception of the world we are living in. Rebecca Rosenblum is a gifted chronicler of our time, in our time.

Mark Paterson is the author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers. His story “Something Important and Delicate” won the 2010 3Macs carte blanche Prize.

The stories in Cathy Stonehouse’s debut collection depict life as a series of sad, violent, and sometimes insane acts. Fittingly, they are populated by sad, violent, and sometimes insane characters. This is not uplifting, syrupy beach reading. Something About the Animal is a dark, often unsettling book that remains true to its own gloomy fictional universe.

Wicked deeds abound: murder, rape, molestation, beatings, imprisonment, and animal torture are all featured in Something About the Animal. For some of Stonehouse’s characters, a horror suffered or witnessed leads to near or complete psychosis. They live in an altered state where the real world mingles with the visions and voices inside their heads. Violence – genuine or imagined, self-inflicted or otherwise – is their common escape route.

Despite so much misery, happiness is not altogether absent in Something About the Animal. It is, however, subject to interpretation. In “A Little Winter,” Jen reminisces about how her father’s frequent beatings of her mother sounded like the “slap of fresh dough” and how she had “(made) comfort of this.” In “The Stockholm Syndrome,” Susan, imprisoned by her boyfriend Anton and subjected to brutal assaults, uses the word “bliss” to describe her situation. Another character with a violent boyfriend, Shelley, in “Salt and Clay,” feels a sense of “cleansing” when Matt breaks her arm; “a wound that took away what hope was left.” Like a gas that becomes liquid in the absence of sufficient heat, it’s this elimination of hope that alters what happiness means. In a book so dark, a complete lack of happiness would have been reasonable, if unremarkable. Stonehouse adds a layer of nuance to her work by changing the parameters by which happiness is defined.

Stonehouse turns the lights down even more with her depiction of would-be protectors. The aforementioned, arm-breaking Matt shows his caring side when, wishing to keep Shelley safe from a murderer on the loose in the neighbourhood, he roughly pushes her onto the bed and orders her to stay inside, even as he himself goes out. In “A Little Winter,” Jen is a veteran of anti-nuclear proliferation demonstrations and a resident of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Despite her non-violent appearance, however, Jen harbours a violent streak. Before entering the Camp, she slapped her two stepsons “soundly” and repeatedly, and in the Camp fantasizes about “setting fire to its inhabitants.” At every turn, there is peril. Even when a genuinely nice person surfaces, like doting husband Jeffrey in “Ravenous Hours,” peace is hard to come by. Standard logic might dictate that the pregnant and near-incessantly hungry Gloria should appreciate his efforts to feed her, as well as for the way he “treads lightly through the jungle of her hormones,” but Jeffrey instead becomes an object of her contempt. Within the gloomy realm of Something About the Animal, this makes perfect sense.

Cathy Stonehouse performs a delicate balancing act with her first book by presenting troubling subject matter with precise and expressive prose. Even the saddest moments are sometimes beautifully rendered. In “A Special Sound,” young Gaynor’s sick mother “died so fast that even the morning after there was still half a homemade Battenburg cake in the rose-patterned tin for (the family) to finish.” In this way, Something About the Animal brings us to a dark place but leaves just enough light on to make it through the night.

Mark Paterson is the author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers. His story “Something Important and Delicate” won the 2010 3Macs carte blanche Prize.

“I learned early on that things don’t come out of nowhere,” says the narrator in “Baby Teeth,” one of eleven stories in Teri Vlassopoulos’s Bats or Swallows. “There is always a buildup.”

With such an exceptional debut collection, Vlassopoulos may herself appear to have come out of nowhere. Her own buildup, however, can be found in over a decade of zine writing, a training ground that has served her well.

There’s a mesmeric quality to Vlassopoulos’s storytelling. Her writing is warm, uncomplicated, and beguilingly intimate. She produces crisp sentences that are economical in words and generous in personality. From “What Counts”:

When I met Nick, I thought he was nice. A little dumb, but nice, and he didn’t go to my high school, which was the most important thing. He came over while my parents were out and I played him ‘Country Feedback’ on my guitar. As I fumbled between E minor and G, he leaned over and kissed me.

Her characters are genuine, situated in moments or periods of tension. While this is pretty standard stuff for short stories, what distinguishes Vlassopoulos’s work is her ability to insinuate continuation; the worlds she constructs allow us to easily imagine these characters before and after their existences on the page. Her stories epitomize what Chris Power wrote in a Guardian piece about the plight of the short story in a world that favours novels: “The short story…acknowledges the vastness and diversity of life by the very act of focusing on one small moment or aspect of it. The story is small precisely because life is so big.” Bats or Swallows is full of such small moments; moments that suggest lives so big.

Relationships undergoing alteration is the book’s recurring theme. People once close drift apart from each other, an occurrence recognized and examined by at least one of the parties involved. In “A Secret Handshake,” featuring a sibling dynamic reminiscent of To Kill A Mockingbird’s Scout and Jem, a twelve-year old girl laments her older brother’s new assertiveness and subsequent distance. In “What You Want and What You Need,” a married couple attempts to fill a gap by switching to an open relationship, only to see an even wider fissure develop between them. In “What Counts,” the book’s best story, high school student Esther navigates a shifting relationship landscape populated by a new boyfriend, a cousin, and a longtime best friend. It’s in these instances of change that Vlassopoulos displays her talent for writing tremendously human characters who experience joy and uncertainty, passion and pain.

At a time when short story collections are receiving, deservedly, more and more attention, add Bats or Swallows to the growing list of those that merit a close look. Teri Vlassopoulos has a voice that rings true, imaginings filled with significance, and an ability to express these in a deceptively easy manner. You might even say it comes out of nowhere.

Mark Paterson is the author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers. His story “Something Important and Delicate” won the 2010 3Macs carte blanche Prize.

Bats or Swallows is a finalist for the 2011 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, sponsored by the Writers Union of Canada. The award is named after Danuta Gleed, a writer whose first collection of short stories, One of the Chosen, was posthumously published after her death in December, 1996.

From soups to cocktails to Chicken McNugget sauce, sweet and sour is one of the world’s most popular and enduring flavours. I have a theory about why this is so. The key to sweet and sour’s success is in its ability to deceive. The first thing my palate detects is the sweet. In a flash, expectations and associations of a sugary sort – lollipops, cotton candy, birthday cake – form in my mind. In another flash, however, the sour kicks in. Suddenly, I’m tasting something much more complicated, much more adult.  A similar happy deception occurs repeatedly in Julie Booker’s debut short story collection, Up Up Up.

This book is very funny. It’s playful. There are flickers of whimsy. For all of its sweetness, however, shadows abound. An undeniable sense of gloom awaits around many of its corners. Though on their surface these stories can look like candy, their flavour is far more mature.

The book’s lead story, “Geology in Motion,” perhaps best exemplifies Booker’s ability to first delight, then bite. Lorrie and Katie, obese best friends, set off on an Alaskan wilderness vacation. Many things are going on in this story, but the most obvious is situational humour. As the hefty adventurers paddle among glaciers, their double kayak floats “dangerously low in the water.” Instead of trail mix, the baggie on their spray deck contains Smarties. Erecting their tent, Lorrie and Katie bend “without grace to pin the corners.” Booker genially invites us to snicker at the spectacle she’s created. And still, an underlying gravity exists. At a bed and breakfast, the women sit at “a dining table that cut(s) into their bellies.” Lorrie is more adept than Katie at coping with the rigours of the outdoors, a feeling that’s liberating even if it comes at her friend’s expense. The real sting, however, is saved for the final scene, when two lifetimes’ worth of mockery is brought to the fore. What were jokes only a few pages prior assume a completely different  connotation.

“Sacrifice” takes place in another vacation setting: a group tour through Tibet. Two women take it upon themselves to pilfer and abandon objects belonging to fellow members of the group, secretly sacrificing the articles to atone for their owners’ various transgressions. A can of Spam is tossed out the window of the moving minibus. A bra is left tied like a flag to a pole on a mountain pass. On the surface, there is much humour in these acts. Beneath it, though, is desperate defiance. Subject to the strict customs of the country and to the shifting whims of their tour guide, the sacrifices’ perpetuators are exacting a measure of control over a situation in which they have precious little.

Booker reverses the order of sweet and sour in one of the book’s best stories, “How Fast Things Go.” Here, starkness takes centre stage in a gritty study of staying true to a violent drunk of a boyfriend. Stories like “Levitate” and “Speculators” feature a comparable rawness of language and subject matter. Despite this, there is palpable joy, wrapped up mainly in celebration of youth and, especially, of autonomy won.

Balance is vital to a good sweet and sour: too much sweet and it’s candy, too much sour and you’re sucking a lemon. With Up Up Up, Julie Booker has served up a first book that’s hilarious and heartbreaking, merry and sombre. It’s an irresistible mix.

Mark Paterson is the author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers. His story “Something Important and Delicate” won the 2010 3Macs carte blanche Prize.

For somebody who writes with a sledgehammer, Daniel Allen Cox is pretty damned eloquent. The Montreal author’s second novel, Krakow Melt, is rampage on paper. But for a few distractions, it scorches its way through 151 pages and, like all good fires, leaves a smoldering afterglow.

Seen through the eyes of Radek Tomaszewski – twenty-five, bisexual, artistic, and obsessed with fire – is Poland, 2005. The stranglehold of the Soviet Union is long gone but a culture of entrenched, often violent homophobia excludes the country’s gays from the freedom the revolution purports to have won. Armed with imagination, audacity and fire, and along with Dorota – a friend, a lover, a comrade – Radek goes to war.

Cox casts Radek from a mold of complexities and contradictions, creating an authentic character with label-proof skin. He’s tough and he’s scared. He’s brazen and he’s shy. He calls his fight a “war of visibility” but has a history of darkened boiler room sexual encounters. He builds maquettes of cities with devastating fires in their pasts and burns them all over again in galleries, yet when asked about his influences he eschews other miniaturists and cites Pink Floyd’s The Wall as “all you need to know about building and tearing down.”

While Radek is waging war with Polish society, he’s also fighting an internal battle. His Stockholm syndrome-like relationship with fire is what propels and, simultaneously, threatens to destroy him, as it did his house as a child. Horror and heartbreak don’t get much more beautifully written than in Cox’s rendering of six-year old Radek’s tragic introduction to fire. Hold your breath and try not to inhale the smoke.

A few of Cox’s chapters occur beyond the confines of Radek and Dorota’s principal story: a medical log written by a closeted gay surgeon tending to the ailing Pope John Paul II, website text from a manufacturer of fire-prevention material, and blow-by-blow descriptions of historical YouTube videos. While these sequences provide context – particularly when they juxtapose Poland’s struggle for freedom and its vicious societal homophobia – they lack the energy that the rest of the book is so thick with. A scene occurring on a screen does not a misstep automatically make, however. To the contrary, when Radek and Dorota carry out a political Easter Monday prank, Cox recounts the incident through the transcript of a television news report, and we are right there with the characters.

Radek and Dorota are a gem of a pair. Their relationship is simultaneously profound and playful, steeped in sexual tension; early on, he describes her as “the ideal warrior: knowledgeable, fearless, an ass of sculpted glass. I realized on the spot that we could accomplish great things together, as long as I didn’t ruin it by requesting a blowjob.”

Krakow Melt is, like Radek, brash, wild, and inventive. Daniel Allen Cox’s real accomplishment, however, is his ability to use these elements – his sledgehammer side – not for shock value alone but to enhance a book that, at its core, possesses a lingering significance. In every revolution there are casualties, those who never taste the triumph they contributed to. When you want to destroy something, you run the risk of destroying yourself. The fire, however, is beautiful while it burns.

Mark Paterson is the author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers. His story “Spring Training” won first prize in the 5^th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. He is currently writing a novel called With the Lights Out.

With reports of the printed word’s imminent death arriving on a near daily basis, it is uplifting to see a magazine, rather than crumple before the seemingly inevitable, make a concerted effort to improve its physical package. With its 79^th issue, Canadian Notes & Queries unveiled a smart redesign for which they entrusted the vision of graphic novelist and designer Seth, author of, among others, George Sprott and the Palooka-Ville series. The result is a decidedly hip new look for the 42-year old journal of literature and criticism.

As far as names go, and this is putting it kindly, “Canadian Notes & Queries” is a marketing consultant’s sweaty nightmare. A magazine title could hardly evoke less enthusiastic assumptions about what awaits inside. CNQ, however, is actually home to some of the liveliest and boldest literary criticism in the country. So while Seth’s redesign includes a new and more attractive size, logo and cover for CNQ, his most significant contribution comes in the form of an injection, front and centre, of some humour at the journal’s own expense. Enter the comic mascots: rugged and grandfatherly Hudson (who beams proudly, “I handle the notes”) and aristocratic Stanfield (who — you guessed it — “deal(s) with the queries”). The ability to laugh at one’s self, especially for a small-circulation lit mag in the middle of Magazine Armageddon, is a sure sign of health.

Not lost amid the bells and whistles of this episode of Extreme Makeover: Can Lit Edition is substance. Always one of Canada’s most ardent defenders of the short story, CNQ dedicates its re-launch issue to an examination and promotion of the overlooked and undervalued literary form. The Short Story Issue comes just two years after CNQ produced – alongside The New Quarterly – the Salon des Refusés, a spirited response to the Jane Urquhart-edited Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories anthology.

In separate articles, Clark Blaise, Mark Anthony Jarman and CNQ editor Alex Good laud the short story and pan the mulish notion that it is, as Good laments, “a somehow less important, inferior literary form” compared to the novel. True to the spirit of the issue, there are three essays, by Robert Thacker, Douglas Glover and Michael Darling, devoted to individual short stories – two of Alice Munro’s and one of Audrey Thomas’s. This in addition to a thorough study by Jeet Heer of Leon Rooke’s novella “Gator Wrestling” from The Last Shot.

Other highlights include a new story by Rebecca Rosenblum, whose 2008 debut collection Once placed her at the forefront of Canada’s next wave of short story writers. And Ryan Bigge, who is as funny as he is combative, swings his wrecking ball and demolishes four of the five titles shortlisted for the 2009 Giller Prize (only Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean evades the razing). Bigge’s piece is a prime example of the kind of hard-hitting, unapologetic and, yes, entertaining criticism that distinguishes CNQ.

For all of the venom they’re known for (just ask André Alexis), after reading The Short Story Issue I was left with the overall sense, and not for the first time, that Canadian Notes & Queries’s editorial staff and contributors care. They wouldn’t involve themselves in such a thankless business if they didn’t. Carrying out a major overhaul and upgrade of their in-print product in the age of the iPad and Kindle is but more proof.

Mark Paterson is the author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers. His story “Spring Training” won first prize in the 5^th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. He is currently writing an exceedingly long short story (of a length known in some circles as “novels”) entitled With the Lights Out.

Contrary to the codes of cliché, there’s more to men at midlife than Ferraris and pharmaceuticals. In his fifth book, the excellent short story collection The End of the Ice Age, Terence Young trains his sharp eye on the tricky state of being between young and old. His meaningful stories catalogue an array of possible experiences that reach beyond the platitudes so heavily relied upon by lazy advertisers, and reveal more nuance than can be expressed in 30 seconds.

Not every man has a so-called crisis, not every man acts out upon reaching a certain age. Some don’t even notice they are aging at all. In the book’s title story, an unnamed he is informed by his lover, an unnamed she, “Your problem is you still don’t think you’re old.” Indeed, he observes, he does feel like he’s younger than everyone else, even those who are officially younger, but he’s perplexed as to why he should consider it a problem. With this character who feels immune to getting older, as if he alone is capable of resisting the march of time, Young alludes to our tendency to feel self-important. He shows, however, that the clock is undeniably ticking, unstoppable, literally and figuratively. The lover is too absorbed in her compulsive reading to ever check the time. Instead, she repeatedly asks Mr. Ageless to check for her. Even if he doesn’t get the message, the reader does. And with a deft switch to the present tense for the last sentence of the story, Young reminds us time stops for no one, not even his own characters.

Resentment and redemption figure importantly in “Fair Market Value.” Ted, married with two children, has an epiphany when his childhood home unexpectedly goes up for sale: the reason “he’s never been truly happy all these years” was his parents’ sale of the place and his subsequent departure from it. To right the wrong, he buys it. Ted’s decision constitutes a move to a new town for his family. It quickly becomes his wife and children’s turn to bear a grudge; she for the costly and time-consuming renovations the old house requires and they, more significantly, for the uprooting. Both kids talk of buying back their own old house when they are old enough, and the cycle of indulgence and injury is firmly set in motion.

Other themes treated to Young’s precision include mortality angst (“Fair Enough,” “That Time of Year,” “Last of the Silent Movies”), the search for meaning in one’s existence (“Dream Vacation,” “Suburbs Going Down”), the unease of bumping into a past lover (“Mole”), and becoming what you purport to abhor (“Infestation”).

Young’s sense of humour is sharp and often delightfully morose. A bizarre roadside accident in “The Garden of the Fugitives” involving a windsurf  board, a gun, some beer bottles and a moving van is a case in point. Young’s style is concise and uncomplicated, but nothing feels incomplete, nothing feels unsaid. He can, in only a few words, evoke feelings intrinsically understood. His description of the awkwardness of a party buffet, for example: “It’s not easy to balance a beer and scoop up a spoonful of rotini at the same time.” One sentence and the reader is there, in the character’s skin, wishing to grow a third arm adapted for efficient rotini scooping.

Men the world over will continue to age and, undoubtedly, the cheap jokes will persist. But for a reminder of midlife’s true and diverse face, men of middle age and those who love them can always come back to their copy of The End of the Ice Age. As long as they can recall where they left it.

Mark Paterson’s story “Spring Training” won the 5^th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. Author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers, Mark is currently writing a novel called With the Lights Out.

Along with disaster movies of the 1970s and all-night bowling alleys, strange little books are one of life’s great pleasures. Just such a creation is The Olive and the Dawn, a slim short story collection by Montreal author Ian Orti.

Dreamlike in tone, Orti’s work is at once odd and humorous. Linear time is insignificant; the future and the past weave their way in and out of the narrative along with alternative endings found in stories called, aptly, “Epilogue,” “Last Call,” and “Postscript.” The Olive is the common thread, a character who appears in the majority of the stories wearing a myriad of different hats; we see him as a horny tennis hopeful, a gallant bicycle thief, a frostbitten drunk. Whatever his incarnation, the Olive is a romantic. His great love is the Dawn, and though we hear of her more often than see her, she is the driving force behind the Olive’s tumultuous life.

The highlight of the book is “And Then the Disco Came to Ecuador.” Told in fairytale fashion, this story mixes a rousing cocktail of teen longing, sibling loyalty, and disco dancing. This could be an alternate universe Sound of Music, the drape-clad von Trapp children trading in mountaintop sessions of “Do-Re-Mi” for sweat, hips, and “music loud enough to drown speech in its own futility.” It’s impossible to resist rooting for six brothers and sisters with the common and admirable goal of sneaking out of the house in the night to join the boogieing throng beneath “the mirrored cubes of Ecuador’s first disco ball.” You’ll want to read this story quietly, to keep from waking their parents.

Ian Orti does things that the most bumptious member of your writers’ critique group will tell you not to do. He addresses the reader directly. He reveals the future, repeatedly. He spends a paragraph on a detailed restaurant breakfast scene only to follow up with “But this wasn’t actually how it happened.” Your clever friend would ask, in the living room, food court café, or wherever it is that you meet every two weeks to pick apart each other’s work: If that wasn’t how it happened, why bother writing it? Because, you might want to answer for the author, if there is no risk involved in the act, why bother writing at all?

Now I’m going to imagine ideal readers for The Olive and the Dawn. The first three that come to mind are:

1. A dude with a red goatee who works at the video store nobody goes to anymore.

2. A 26-year old CÉGEP English teacher who’s anxious about a course on Roman mythology she got stuck teaching this semester even though she knows precious little about the subject.

3. A guy who has tapes dating back to 1989 of himself calling radio talk shows. He goes by the alias “Ron in Chomedey.”

And, like you, all three every now and then enjoy old disaster movies and bowling after midnight.

Mark Paterson is the 2009 winner of Geist magazine’s Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. Author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers, Mark is currently writing a novel, With the Lights Out.

Okay, so the generation that came of age in the early days of the 21st century may not be the most disadvantaged social group in human history, but the kids do suffer — in literary terms at least — from underrepresentation. Zoe Whittall’s latest book, the novel Holding Still For As Long As Possible, chronicles a year in the lives of three mid-twenties residents of Toronto’s trendy/squalid/gentrifying Parkdale neighbourhood.

Shining a light on a world of “indie-rock near-beards, old Descendants T-shirt(s), and faded designer jeans,” Whittall’s characters are plucked from the ranks of the overanxious, overprescribed, and perpetually wired.

Billy, who had a brief career as a teen pop star, is a slave to anxiety; she has vividly described panic attacks that have her convinced she’s suffering from any number of awful maladies. If it isn’t a stroke that’s making her feel like her “mouth is dissolving,” then it’s an aneurism, or meningitis, or flesh-eating disease. That she and Maria, her girlfriend since the end of high school, have recently broken up is of little help.

Josh is also going through the dissolution of a long-term relationship, with the added complication that he still lives with his ex-girlfriend.  A Toronto paramedic, Josh finds escape in the job’s long, often dull, hours. His busy moments at work are anything but boring, and Josh does his best, though not always successfully, to tune out the emotion of the tragedies he’s witness to. Whittall’s portrayal of the world and work of ambulance crews is convincing and gripping.

Amy, Josh’s aforementioned ex, is a filmmaker from a well-to-do family. Of all the characters, major or minor, only Amy seems overly concerned with appearances and identity politics. The novel is populated by, as Josh puts it, “complicated people with many challenges,” who find in each other the kind of security of community where anything’s normal. Josh recalls the early days of their relationship, when he had to insist that Amy not, when introducing him to friends, “qualify this is my boyfriend with he’s trans.” That she stands out for worrying “that she was too conventional,” “like an ordinary straight girl,” is a point well-made.

Billy, Josh, and Amy also serve as the novel’s trio of rotating narrators. Whittall invests generously in each of them and crafts three distinct voices. Her clear and fluid style makes the thorny task of telling a story from multiple perspectives seem deceptively uncomplicated. The point-of-view switches work, push the pace, and create an excellent ensemble piece on the page.

Whittall’s writing is vibrant, funny, and smart. She uses the power of the pop culture reference responsibly; rather than inundate, she picks her spots with effective mentions from a delectably oddball arsenal that ranges from Waydowntown to Designing Women. And Billy, Josh, and Amy’s reflections are sharp, supplying insight into “the generation that had e-mail addresses like PonyGirl85@hotmail.com by Grade 4 and took cell phones on their first dates.”

Above all, Holding Still For As Long As Possible is a love story, a universal theme that belongs to no specific generation or other type of group. Zoe Whittall, however, does not escape categorization; this novel firmly pigeonholes her as a kick-ass writer.

Mark Paterson is the 2009 winner of Geist magazine’s Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. Author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers, Mark is currently writing a novel, With the Lights Out.

John Goldbach loves the dark. That is, if the amount of time his characters spend in it is any indication. When they aren’t partying in the woods in the middle of the night, congregating in donut shops and bars with no electricity, or navigating blacked-out suburban streets to get to a babysitting job, they generate their own darkness – temporary unconsciousness – by choking themselves or each other.

Consequences aside, it takes a hell of a lot of confidence to choke oneself to the point of blacking out. Fittingly, Goldbach’s debut collection, Selected Blackouts, is written with a hell of a lot of confidence. The majority of the stories have a voice that’s sure and a style that’s as relaxed as it is mesmerizing. Raw, vivid descriptions abound. “What looked like vomit or beans or blood was sporadically streaked along the long log benches circling the firepit.” It’s hard to look away.

The highlight of the collection is a sequence of three linked stories, “Blackout”, “Blackout II”, and “Outside the Auditorium”.  “Blackout” begins with the splendidly unsettling scene of eight high school boys choking themselves in class until their heads hit their desks, out cold. Pertinently, Goldbach portrays the tedium of small town life that produced the outburst in the first place, following Dave and James, two of the boys suspended from school for the antic, during an unsupervised day off.

The apocalyptic “Blackout II” is the collection’s best story.  Dave and James emerge again, this time during a sweeping blackout whose origin and scope are unknown, as even the radio has fallen silent. In a candlelit donut shop, one old man claims with the kind of confidence only hours of speculation can produce, “All of North America doesn’t have power,” and that terrorists have “dickered” with the power grid. Dave and James react to the information by heading to the bar next door, to see if Kurt, the bartender, is willing to serve them beer despite their underage status. Goldbach’s pacing and style are masterful in this story, neatly balancing an ominous atmosphere with the pleasure of diversion. “Blackout II” gains momentum when Dave and James find a purpose for themselves in the dark: borrow/steal a generator from a ramshackle drunk shack in the woods to run the bar’s juke box on, because, as Dave notes, “Music would be good right now.”

Blackouts, self-imposed or otherwise, are unnecessary in “Outside the Auditorium”. Darkness is provided by the night, in the middle of the woods, at a bush party in the vicinity of the aforementioned drunk shack, owned by a wild man named Quick. While alcohol and drugs are never in short supply throughout Selected Blackouts, consumption finally crests here and the most feral elements of nighttime surface. That’s feral elements as in a goat gets slaughtered in the woods by a wild man who owns a drunk shack that the local kids like to party at. Again, it’s hard to look away.

Good thing it’s so dark.

Mark Paterson is the author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers. His story “Spring Training” won first prize in the 5th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest and appears in the current issue of Geist as well as at www.geist.com

A perpetual 9-to-5 in an antiseptic office tower, tedious tasks, clueless colleagues, stringent and watchful upper management, and – shudder – a mall in the basement. Surely this is hell? In Emily Schultz’s Heaven Is Small, this portrait of corporate banality is actually heaven. More specifically, The Heaven Book Company, an exceedingly successful publishing house where dead souls  churn out romance novels.

The socially uneasy Gordon Small is one such unfortunate. A failed writer in life, he is hired by Heaven as a proofreader following his death, “an event he had failed to notice”. Gordon remains foggy about his newly departed status for nearly the first third of the novel, busily adapting to Heaven’s maze of bureaucracy, awkwardly interacting with new co-workers, and quickly becoming bored by the material he’s assigned to proof. During these early chapters, Schultz’s descriptive prowess actually works against her: the monotony of office work is so skilfully depicted that the story itself gets off to a sluggish start.

Gordon brings to Heaven the same insecurities and obsessions that plagued him in life. These centre mainly on his ex-wife, Chloe Gold, a renowned poet and novelist whose successes left Gordon and his own middling writing career in the dust. His fixation makes him restless, unable to settle into the lacklustre routine at Heaven. He wanders, roaming Heaven’s halls, the subway, and his old neighbourhood. As Gordon begins to understand the true nature of his condition and, subsequently, question his and his co-workers’ sterile existence at Heaven, Schultz hits her stride. The novel takes off and develops into an absorbing comic story of rebellion and redemption, Gordon finding the nerve to act in death in ways he was too timid for in life.

Heaven Is Small is Schultz’s fourth book and second novel, following the excellent Joyland, her mesmerizing tale of 1980s adolescence. With Heaven Is Small, Schultz broadens her appeal while continuing to demonstrate a gift for prose and the inspired turn of phrase. In many ways, this is also a novelist’s novel, examining as well as lampooning the writing life, its pitfalls and rewards. Gordon Small’s existential examinations of his purpose at Heaven when “no one…knows…that this building exists” mirror a writer’s anxiety over the prospect of toiling in obscurity. Still, in death, Gordon experiences liberation from the inhibitions and reservations that impeded his writing in life. “What I have been given here at Heaven is truly a gift…Endless hours, infinite light, paper supplies, envelopes, free postage.” The subtle injection of humour, like Gordon’s beloved free stamps, into the most earnest of moments is trademark Schultz. She never hits the reader over the head with it, shrewdly allowing what isn’t said to speak loudly and clearly.

Some twenty-five years ago, Morrissey penned the memorable lines, “I was looking for a job and then I found a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now.” For Emily Schultz, Heaven, thanks to its HR department’s closed-circuit cameras, knows even more than that. In Heaven Is Small, Schultz succeeds in imagining an amusing world where eternal life is a fate worse than death.

Mark Paterson is the author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers. Recently, his story “Spring Training” won first prize in the 5th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest and will appear in the summer issue of Geist.

IF A STORY IS A PATH AND A TELLER THE GUIDE, a good storyteller decorates the path with details that keep readers walking, always eager to peer around the corner, to discover what lies ahead. In his novel, The Mountain Clinic, Harold Hoefle demonstrates the power of detail with a touching tale of a young man’s circuitous search for answers about his curious family.

The novel opens in 1966 when Walter Schwende is seven years old. Born to Austrian parents living in Scarborough, Walter’s youthful suburban security is shattered when his father, Franz, disappears, presumed dead. Walter is devastated, but, refreshingly, Hoefle doesn’t overwhelm with syrupy father-figure reverence. Prior to the disappearance, Walter’s opinion of his father is multifaceted: he’s somebody to respect, to love, to please, to fear. This mixture of feelings doesn’t make the sudden loss any less distressing, however, and a lack of hard evidence – namely, Franz’s body– prevents Walter from experiencing closure.

Walter’s mother, though, swiftly accepts that her husband is dead — too swiftly for Walter’s taste. He formulates hopeful theories to the contrary that she refuses to listen to. In the ensuing years, Walter grows increasingly frustrated with his mother’s long absences and, when home, her distance and preoccupation with groceries and meals. “She stopped crying, wiped some crumbs from my lips and ate them.” As it’s too painful to stay, Walter turns to travel in his mid-twenties. His journeying takes him to Vancouver, to a northern mining town, Nicaragua, Montreal, and finally for a visit to his father’s native Austria.

Each of Walter’s moves represents a chapter in The Mountain Clinic, and each is, arguably, a story on its own. Throughout, it is Hoefle’s attention to honest details that brings Walter’s story to life.

In an early scene, Walter recalls visiting a park with his father. Hoefle uses a paragraph to describe the sounds in the park, its structures, the “whooshing plummet” of sliding down a slide. By the paragraph’s sixth sentence, Walter and Franz are leaving, hand in hand, and yet, for all its physical brevity, the scene feels abundant. The paragraph’s seventh and final sentence reads, simply, “The sky had purple in it.” Banal on its own, but in the context of memory, this small yet crucial detail is the gas in the time machine’s tank, securing arrival at a specific place and time. This infusion of authenticity produces a measure of blurring between fiction and truth, and readers may be excused for forgetting at times that the book is a novel and not a memoir. What matters is Hoefle’s ability to consistently illuminate the most important thing: the story.

There is little pretense to this book, no gratuitous symbolism, no oppressive metaphors. The Mountain Clinic reads like a telling, with a likable voice that warrants listening to. This affability is smartly offset by thorny subjects like mental illness and family dysfunction, and nasty environments like the war-torn Nicaragua of the 1980s, and a mine with an antagonized workforce. Writers typically do well not to allow the truth to get in the way of a good story. To the benefit of The Mountain Clinic, Harold Hoefle puts a different spin on this maxim by not allowing the overly contrived to muddle good fiction.

Mark Paterson is the author of the short story collections

A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers.

HIPSTER, FRET NOT. Gulch Creek Holdup is not a film you’re supposed to have seen. Gulch Creek Holdup is a four-minute home movie drama shot for fun in the mid-1950s. I saw it on Christmas Eve, 1981, during a gathering at my grandparents’ house when I was ten.

My grandfather wasn’t in the mood; a monumental campaign of begging and prodding had to be waged to convince him to dust off the projector and haul out the movie screen. He then grudgingly went about finding an appropriate dictionary-atlas combination, one just the right height for the projector to sit atop. Finally, he delicately removed the round reel of Super-8 film from its can and carefully fed it into the projector. Clearly, my grumpy grandfather was the only person in the room who possessed such extraordinary expertise.

Gulch Creek Holdup followed a simple, Old West storyline: a bandit, (played by my father, age 10) wearing a ten gallon hat and bandana, carries out a daring bank heist. The hapless bank teller (my father’s youngest sister) is a baby and too cute to be blamed for giving up the loot without a fight. The outlaw makes off with the goods, callously gunning down an innocent bystander (my grandmother) during his getaway. The venerable town sheriff (my uncle) and deputy (another aunt, this one out of diapers at least) quickly mobilize. They mount broomstick steeds and set off in pursuit. The murderous thief leads them on a furious chase across the back yard and into an adjacent field, where he is finally apprehended.

The final scene is Gulch Creek Holdup’s best. A large, upside-down playpen stands in as the jailhouse. The bandit is locked up, joining a previously captured convict played by none other than my grandfather. Dressed in a white t-shirt, jeans, and a pair of thick horn-rimmed glasses more the style of the 1950s than the 1850s, he strikes a gruff prison pose. His ill-tempered expression up on the screen is the same look he gave when asked to break out the equipment in the first place.

But after the movie ended, as I watched him lovingly rewind the film, I realized he had been acting in both settings.

Gulch Creek Holdup is my earliest significant art memory. It struck me that the very people sitting in the room, my supposedly grouchy grandpa included, had made this thing. For the first time, I thought about art as something that is created, and not simply consumed. It was a trigger moment; the desire to create was as much a physical sensation as a conscious thought. I began to conceive of art as something I wanted to make.

As far as gifts go, this one ranks among the best I’ve ever received.

Mark Paterson is the author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers. Though writing is his game, he knows his way around his Super-8 projector and is only too happy to haul it out upon request.

“EVA’S PLACE IS BUSIEST IN THE EVENINGS – lots of fried cheese and ass-grabbing near midnight.” So begins Rebecca Rosenblum’s fantastic first collection, Once, setting an exceptionally compelling tone that scarcely lets up throughout the book’s sixteen short stories. 

Rosenblum is quick to captivate, her voice convivial and engaging. Her dialogue is authentic, often impeccable. Her deadpan pacing mesmerizes, resulting in amplification of the book’s several humorous and dramatic moments. So too, with her sneak-attack endings.  Frequently, the only clue a story is wrapping up is the blank space at the bottom of a page; the eye perceives the approaching end before the mind does. A final sentence materializes out of nowhere and yet, once read, a more satisfying conclusion is difficult to imagine.

There is an enticing cheerfulness to Rosenblum’s prose that serves as an effective foil to the often bleak subject matter she explores. “Teyla was going to puke soon, or else go eat a sandwich.” Though disaster may be imminent, hope, or at least a sliver of it, is always somewhere in the vicinity.

Once is populated by convincing characters who live on the margins, inhabiting worlds of minimum wage employment in restaurants, hotels, bookstores, and fruit warehouses. Their livelihoods depend on city buses that are either late or don’t come, and when they do, don’t always stop. They squat in burned-out, abandoned houses in the suburbs. They take their morning Burger King croissants with a side of ketchup on a cup lid (is there, in truth, any other way to take a morning Burger King croissant?). Though these characters often lack power and control, they whine little and wallow less. Rather, they negotiate their tricky existences with intelligence and reason, shrewdly recognizing when to simply roll with the meagre hand they’ve been dealt, and when to wager on a measure of gratification. In this way, they manage to survive, and tolerate survival.

While Rosenblum’s stories are consistently strong, standouts include “Linh Lai” and “Chilly Girl”. Recently arrived in Canada from Viet Nam, Linh Lai navigates an unfamiliar landscape where she barely understands anybody and nobody understands her. Comfort, however, comes in her attempts to re-enact potentially neck-breaking stunts from her beloved action movies, or tricks performed by skate punks who loiter outside the restaurant where she waitresses. In the Journey Prize-shortlisted “Chilly Girl”, the title character’s hypersensitivity to cold sets the stage for an uplifting fairytale of awkwardness and seclusion.

The best story is “Wall of Sound”, in which high school dropout Jamesy teeters between two utterly disparate worlds. He lives violently in the aforementioned squat, hustling, squeegeeing, stealing, and drugging with Samir and Hart. Unlike his squatmates, however, Jamesy has maintained a connection with family: his blithely naïve, doting grandparents. During visits to their house, Jamesy helps out with yard work, is served bologna sandwiches and tea, and receives impromptu gifts of mixed tapes. Rosenblum is in top form here, demonstrating Jamesy’s ability to adapt to both situations while feeling at home in neither.

Winner of the Metcalf-Rooke Award, Once is a tremendous debut. Rebecca Rosenblum has made an early mark rich with potential and promise.

Mark Paterson lives in Montreal and is the author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers. While no stranger to fried cheese, he prefers morning ass-grabbing to the evening variety.