DEBRIS, another debut story collection I want you to read, so go get it! Go on! GO!

DEBRIS: Stories
KEVIN HARDCASTLE
Biblioasis
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The eleven remarkable stories in Kevin Hardcastle’s debut Debris introduce an authentic new voice. Written in a lean and muscular style and brimming with both violence and compassion, these stories unflinchingly explore the lives of those — MMA fighters, the institutionalized, small-town criminals — who exist on the fringes of society, unveiling the blood and guts and beauty of life in our flyover regions.

My Review: Another debut collection for a Canadian writer! It seems I have an affinity for CanLit, doesn’t it. Hardcastle, like last month’s reviewee Kris Bertin, was well-published in prestigious venues before this book was collected. This collection won the 2016 Trillium Prize, which is awarded to a book by an Anglophone Ontario writer (a separate prize, Prix Trillium, is presented to a Francophone Ontario writer). It’s not only a prestigious award, it’s lucrative, carrying a purse with $20,000 in it! The publisher receives a publicity budget boost of $2,500 as well. Les Canadiens, they know how to do literature right, eh? Without further ado, we shall proceed to the eleven stories Hardcastle and Biblioasis have given us using the Bryce Method:

Old Man Marchuk starts the reader off at 90mph down the road Hardcastle has us pointed down. Constable Hoye, from Canada’s eastern half, gets a call from prairie town local Marchuk to come to the scene of a shooting--one he’s just committed. Two boys burgled his barn and he shot them, then called to report it so someone would come clean his mess up. Hoye sees to it he stands trial and thereby becomes a pariah. He and his pregnant wife, later his newborn son as well, live in a state of siege. Old man Marchuk’s relatives and friends harass the man, escalating their violence until he surprises them all with a surprise raid that scatters the malefactors. But he, Jenny, and their new baby are stuck there but still aren’t safe…can’t transfer out for “one year, three months, and eighteen days.” Bone chilling. 3.5 stars

The Rope really did a number on me. Matthew comes home to help his mother Maryanna after she has her license revoked for one too many impaired driving stops. Booze is her sole companion and always was. Her life is ruled by her addiction and she has no interest in or intention of changing that. Matthew does everything he can but, in the end, Maryanna has to hit rock bottom in spectacular fashion and decide from there where she wants to end up. A harrowing look in a full-length mirror for me. Unsettling. 4 stars

Montana Border has us riding along with Daniel, a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter on the deep backwoods circuit. He wins, loses, bleeds, and suffers while doing the one thing he knows how to do: fight. Like all Hardcastle’s men, he has no way to conceive of a life without violence. Daniel wins one victory too many and comes under fire...literally...from the defeated and injured man’s biker friends. A good man in his way, Daniel is one of the men the world doesn’t need and he knows it. He is in a struggle all the way from cradle to grave and it seems as though he doesn’t much mind what side of the dirt he’s on. Bleak and beautiful. 4.5 stars

To Have to Wait has us riding along with Paul and Matthew while they drive from their small Eastern hometown to retrieve their father from his stay in a coastal public mental health facility. (This is how you know the story is set in Canada, there’s a public mental health facility.) While taking a pit stop on the road a conflict arises and is resolved with coordinated violence from the brothers. They proceed to pick the old man up, bring him home, and sit down to a family dinner. Honestly this is the only story in the collection where the violence wasn’t well used. It felt to me as though the author said, “whoops there’s no fighting in this one,” picked up his quill, dipped it in blood, and rectified that. Not my favorite story. 3 stars

Bandits begins with a weird coming-of-age ritual: father, son, and extended (male) family out snowmobiling across a frozen lake to go shoot the hell out of the local police chief’s ice-bound boathouse. Ah, thought I, we’re back into the Hardcastle groove! And are we ever. The family business here is banditry, organized by Charlie’s pa, a small-time crook whose oversized personality and massive musculature make him impossible for his son, his brothers, and his nephew to disobey him. It’s a very clever business centered on the weather. They don’t pull heists unless it’s snowing or about to snow so they can’t be tracked by their machine’s traces. The local constabulary knows the family is behind the thefts as you do in a small community but can prove nothing. Not to say they’ll quit trying, but they’re up against a smart opponent with a tight crew. But all good things must come to an end, and Charlie faces some high hurdles on his path to adult responsibility. This is a cracking good yarn, exciting and moving in equal measure. A noir film waiting to be made. 5 stars

One We Could Stand to Lose follows Arthur, the night manager of a rundown resort hotel-cum-casino that was once glamourous indeed and is now a blight, a flophouse and a hotspot for violence and murder. He also happens to have a very interesting side business that makes his position extra appealing, one that’s highly illegal and could not be more perfectly disguised by his job. The old glory days don’t haunt Arthur. He lives in the hotel, works in the hotel, breaks the law in the hotel, and until the owner decides it’s time to demolish the hotel, Arthur can’t be bothered to dredge up his memories. He supervises the dismantling and preparation for detonating the place he’s lived for more than fifty years while numb, disbelieving, unsure of what he should think or feel. In the end he makes the only decision that he could possibly make, however painful it is, as there is no alternative. Outstanding, the best in the collection. 5 stars

Spread Low on the Fields is a score-to-settle homecoming story in the vein of Walking Tall. Sean O’Hara comes home to bury his retired father after he is murdered by a fellow retiree and old friend. The murderer can’t stand trial because he has dementia. Sean can’t accept that his father’s death seemingly counts for so little and sets out to even the scales. Haunting. 4 stars

Hunted by Coyotes brings us into the world of the door-to-door scammer/salesman. Those desperate souls who fall into the work when there is nothing else for them to do and then have trouble climbing out of the pit. Road trips to small places, working the poor and the gullible with promises of saving them money. You wonder how these people can look themselves in the mirror? They’re in the same boat as their marks! Everyone for themselves. It’s a chilling and disturbing peek into a life I’m deeply glad not to know firsthand. I have one minor complaint: The coyotes of the title appear, but do nothing to advance the plot. I expected some kind of non-symbolic role for them based on the title, and got none of that. 3.5 stars

Shape of a Sitting Man is another brother/revenge story. The bond of love between brothers is a major subtext in this collection. It’s nowhere more explicit than it is here. A younger brother takes out his older brother’s assailant who left him permanently damaged, unable to function. We’re not told how or why, because who cares? It’s a brother’s duty to stand up for his family when harm has been done, and by god the kid does it. Tight, compact, direct. 4 stars

Debris works the small-town no-secrets vein again, but does so in a delightfully twisty way. It starts from the first line: “Come pale morning the old woman found a greycoat squirrel drifting dead in the swimming pool waters.” That grabbed my nosehairs hard. Eyes still watering, I followed the story of the town’s known miscreant from a family of them that has murder as its stakes. Very seldom do I say this, but this story is crying out to be a novel. There is a wonderful thriller in this thrilling but too short tale of an elderly couple savoring their togetherness while aging as gracefully as they can. Being country folks, they’re very clear on how to survive independent of help when possible but sensible enough to know when to call out the cavalry. The first murder brings the local constable to their door, and as events unfold brings him and his cronies back to follow up a lead the old woman has given them to the whereabouts of the local bad seed. Again stymied by the absence of hard evidence linking the bad seed to the crimes, the constabulary back off. And that’s when the country folk sense of justice stands tall. I loved this gem of a tale. 5 stars

Most of the Houses Had Lost Their Lights charts the troubled course of Kayla’s marriage to Matthew, a man losing his battle with his demons. Kayla is compelled to commit him to a public psychiatric facility (I love Canada’s social safety net) or see him go to prison for assaulting fellow tavern patrons, one of whom ended up embedded in a wall. Her husband absent for the moment, she sets out to keep body and soul housed, fed, and clothed for herself. Being a strong and intelligent woman, she does exactly that. She works hard at a job where she’s the only woman on the shop floor. She fetches Matthew home when he is released and hears words I imagine any spouse would want to hear: “You did everything right,” he said. Deeply satisfying. 4.5 stars

Kevin Hardcastle’s Trillium Award-winning collection also does everything right. No less a luminary than John Irving praises his use of language as “a soothing balm for the pain” that his characters suffer. I concur, and I am reaffirmed in my conviction that CanLit is unfairly neglected here in the USA. There is no shortage of exciting top-quality work in every genre coming south. I really hope that more and more of us will cotton on to this fact and make noise about it. We can all only benefit from increasing awareness of the riches flowing South. Start here! Kevin Hardcastle deserves your immediate attention.

BAD THINGS HAPPEN 5-star story collection full review post

BAD THINGS HAPPEN: Stories
KRIS BERTIN
Biblioasis
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The characters in Bad Things Happen—professors, janitors, webcam models, small-time criminals—are between things. Between jobs and marriages, states of sobriety, joy and anguish; between who they are and who they want to be. Kris Bertin's unforgettable debut introduces us to people at the tenuous moment before everything in their lives changes, for better or worse.

My Review: This is a first collection for Canadian writer Bertin. It represents the fruits of seven years’ life-effort in ten stories. He was well-published in prestigious venues before this book was collected. Comme d’habitude, we’ll go story-by-story with my pearls of wisdom delivered thereunto, aka the Bryce Method:

Bad Things Happen can best be summed up by this quote, spoken by a mid-thirties studmuffin to a sixteen-year-old girl (Dee) with a crush on him:

It’s people. He exhaled. People live everywhere you go, and everywhere you go, people are the same. There’s just more or less of them. … I just prefer less, he said.

Dee had broken into his house a short time before, with her instigator friend Tan, and seen what a Technicolor horror show he lived in. It began the process of disillusioning her about the starched, hunky guy her fantasies had centered on. Welcome to reality, kid. And the next bad thing that happens, well, let’s say it was absolutely no surprise but it was terrifying to any parent of a daughter. 5 stars

Make Your Move is a four-part choose your own adventure of different possible futures for a man with the grimmest past you can think of. He gets into his work limo, and then the fun begins, as the author travels the roads not taken. It’s amazing how much pain Bertin can pack into the one solid evening of driving the kind of people who rent limos around and about, to bars, to Wendy’s drive-through, to a snot-nosed kid’s house where his hot mom is worried about him. In the end it’s eight castles and a few fish. 4.5 stars

The Narrow Passage is a perfect movie outline. It’s the working life of Richard, soon to be a father, and Gene, a man whose maturity has been spent picking up garbage in a rural-to-village stretch of Canada. Does anybody remember the show The X Files and its scariest, weirdest episode, the one called “Home?” This story is a cross between it and the movie Deliverance. It kept me awake half a night, poor bastard Richard making a grim discovery:

He seemed to always have a dull headache that stayed with him so long everything seemed grey and strange, like he was in a dream. He felt empty and drained, like a shadow of himself cast on a wall. It was in this state, early in the morning, that he tipped over a steel drum with his work gloves and saw it:
Two beach towels, decorated with the California Raisins, soaked through with blood.
… The towels were balled up, and after he grabbed them, something fell out in the snow and landed with a thick kind of wetness. They were at {their worst pick-up}.
A girl’s nightie, green with lace trim, dark and wet.
The blood looked fresh and red and only a bit of it gone brown, because it was partially frozen. Not even in a bag, but tossed in overtop of one, almost casually. Like it was meant to be there.

The horrors of the rural Narrows of the story’s title are those endemic to any poverty-stricken area; but this particular stop, the lowlifes whose garbage heap Richard and Gene collect without comment or complaint per Gene’s worried instructions, is fast becoming the stuff of Richard’s nightmares. (Mine too. Maybe it comes with the name?) By the story’s end, we’re all ready for the storm to break and when it does, well, it’s just not what you would ever want to know happens in the civilized world. By far the best story in the collection. 5 stars

Girl on Fire Escape sizzles and pops with the energy of a twentysomething guy’s need for sex and connection in any way, shape, or form. Our screw-up of a narrator is working the dish pit in a big city restaurant at night, and washing windows of commercial buildings with a friend in the daytime. His friend is dating a young woman who works as a cam model, which distresses him but it’s a good living. Through this connection our narrator meets and fucks and then steals money with another cam model, a woman with a c-section scar and a very distinctive and beautiful tattoo on her chest. These two lost souls don’t so much connect as they fall into a mutual orbit around the center of gravity that is loneliness. By the end of the story, they’re either going to be Sailor and Lula or Rick and Ilsa. 4.5 stars

Is Alive and Can Move helped me understand my alcoholic roommate much better. It’s the inner monologue of a young-ish survivor of acute alcohol abuse that’s left him with alcohol-induced dementia. He hallucinates reality, an odd concept but one that keeps the story on the move. It’s heartbreaking to realize that, without strict adherence to a routine and a diet of real food and a regimen of medication, people in that stage of brain damage simply don’t function. Bertin, to his great credit, never loses sight of his character’s human dignity, and still tells the tale of the hallucinated reality the narrator lives in with unnerving candor. Doing so without either falling into preach mode or judgment mode is quite a feat. 4.5 stars

Crater Arms did not make one whit of sense to me. I read it three times and came away from each reading without a single clue what I was supposed to get from the experience, and what I actually got was bubkes. Like life. And so it goes. 3.5 stars

Everywhere Money couldn’t make me like the phone scammer narrating it, but I did come away with the idea that money meant less to him than accomplishing something, doing something that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. I’m like that as well, a task-oriented kind of being. But phone scammers are ambulatory shit-piles. We meet Tan, from “Bad Things Happen”, again in this story, and she’s as fucked up as anyone could wish her to be. Her criminal career is well-established, apparently, as she’s working at stealing numbers (slang for credit card and personal data to access the line of credit) from big ballers at a private club to her boyfriend’s sad little phone scammer gig. This world that Bertin’s busily creating for us isn’t one we’d like to live in ourselves, is it? Too much criminality. Too little compassion. But sadly very real. 4.5 stars

The Story Here sounds really familiar to me. A genuinely and frighteningly dysfunctional family has an impromptu family reunion at the narrator’s house. As the only daughter of the three children, the mother of two and wife of one suddenly has her despised serial monogamist/adulterer father on her couch, her typical sibling rival older brother arriving with his new fiancée for family approval, her former stepmother banging on the door demanding to see the cheating old coot who is leaving her, and to top it all off the forest around her house is being leveled and blasted for new development. No wonder she dreams of the end of the world:

I learned to think of the dream not as something that comes to me, but as something that I have. An organ that inflates when my head is on the pillow, fills up the chambers of my mind, and takes over the last hour before my alarm goes off.
In the dream, there’s no comet or atom bomb or alien invaders. No catalyst, just a mindset that we’re all in. It’s just the end and everyone knows it. The only thing that gives it away is how the other people are acting. Cars are clogging the streets, guys with huge crucifixes and torches and Bibles and robes are on the sidewalk, or even on my lawn, and everyone else is just going crazy, screaming or crying or pleading with the sky like something’s listening up there. A lot of people on their knees.

Stress, anxiety, depression...all of the above...middle aged crisis...the narrator isn’t the first or the last person to feel that the world is ending when it’s more likely that she’s just unmercifully bored, frustrated, and trapped. And by the end of the story, I felt that any one of these characters would happily gnaw a limb off to escape the traps they set off every time any of them opens their mouth for any reason except to eat. 5 stars

The Eviction Process features a gay couple, criminals both, in the process of shutting down and revamping their former weed-growing operation house. This necessitates getting the formerly necessary associates to get out of the house along with the grow-lights and so on. Things go smoothly, too smoothly, on their first attempt; then it all falls to hell around them. The older man of the couple has an autistic son who has, apparently, no connection to anyone or anything in reality, and whose function seems to be to buzz, scream, click...our narrator, the younger man, can’t get through the profound disconnect between the child and reality, and the older man has a habit of beating people up, including his lover. As the situation reaches crisis point, there is a disaster that makes emotions run hot and dangerous, but violence is averted by the simulacrum of lovingkindness that glues the two men together. 5 stars

Your #1 Killer reunites us with our dishwashing drifter turned phone scammer as he slinks home to his mom in order to go crazy, get thoroughly drunk, play childhood games and generally cocoon himself in his addictions until, at last, the world around him snaps into focus again. It only does so as he begins a new career: Killing things. Pests, gophers, hornets, skunks, all in less-than-usual ways. His mother, like all mothers, wants him to be happy; he is a sullen stinking mess, which doesn’t make anyone happy. As his recovery of self-esteem gathers momentum, it’s finally in his head that his mother is a real person, is the undeserving recipient of his unkindness and therefore must be treated right at last. It’s the most hopeful story in the collection. It’s a good feeling to see this self-absorbed twit pull his socks up and get on with life in a strange, but workable manner. 4.75 stars

I think that might be the description of Bertin’s rough world in toto: Strange, but workable. Life doesn’t look the same at the bottom of the heap. It’s still life. There’s another day for each of these folks, another chance to make a difference if only to themselves. This is a terrific collection of quality work. Kris Bertin, I salute you, and am awaiting what comes next with happy anticipation.

Live today at The Oak Wheel! BAD THINGS HAPPEN by Kris Bertin, first story collection

Rating: 4* of five

My review of BAD THINGS HAPPEN is live now at The Oak Wheel. This CanLit collection, the first from author Kris Bertin, is worth ordering now before it has to go into a second printing. He's that good.

Biblioasis gets a big thank you for sending me my review copy, and I hope my almost-unqualified rave will be helpful. I want to support presses that find and publish authors of this quality. Please follow my lead!