THE KING'S EVIL, mid-career offering from CanLit leading light David Helwig

THE KING'S EVIL
DAVID HELWIG
Beaufort Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
from $4.99 hardcover, available from various sellers

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Dross stands on the precipice of sanity. One of his last lucid thoughts is that he knows he's going to tumble, shortly, into the abyss of madness. He is drugged by his past, haunted by his mother's madness, addicted to the memories of the woman who rejected him and later died in a hospital cancer ward. He does not know where she is buried.

Trapped in his personal history, Dross packs up his unwieldy body, takes a leave of absence from his work, and moves into his vacationing cousin's house in Niagara. Alone, mesmerized by log fires, Dross doubts if anything can keep him from insanity's beckoning flames.

There is an intruder, however, a knocking on his consciousness, a woman, a stranger with information about his cousin's house. She tells Dross she is a historical researcher and that the house had been razed in 1823 and was rebuilt on the original eighteenth century foundation. He explores the ancient basement one sleepless night. Through a hole in the wall Dross spies another room, deeper than the basement. Hidden there he finds an old book in a locked box, and in the book a secret. The owner was King Charles I who, according to history, was beheaded, but according to the cryptograms and notations in the margin, escaped his recorded fate and lived under another identity on the same foundation where Dross now stands. This is what Dross needs: One small thread of external thought to weave into a web large enough to catch him from his fall. The house in which he cannot sleep, the house in which he consumes too much brandy and too little food, has a history longer and more involved than his own.

Bolstered by a new obsession, Dross sets out to prove history wrong, and in this pursuit he, like Charles I, avoids his own fate.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THOSE LIBRARIES, FOLKS, THEY NEED US...BUT WE NEED THEM MORE.

My Review: I like Wikipedia's "Recent Deaths" obituary aggregation feature. I learned of David Helwig's existence from it. Being a CanLit fancying Murrikun, I sallied forth to the ALIScat site and, after discovering there were several Helwig titles available, eenie-meenied Coming Through: Three Novellas. See my review for details of my appreciation for Author Helwig's writing. The title of this work amused me. The conceit of Charles I not losing his head on 30 January 1649 (370 years ago this week) appealed to me. This slim book appeared among the eight holds I needed to pick up at my local library a few days ago, before they were due to be returned to their originating branches. Faithless to common sense's proddings, I jumped it up the queue. I came home to eagerly begin reading the story at once.

I'm a hopalong reader, not ordinarily reading books...even short ones...in one go. A chapter here, a subheading there, is my habit. It's a means of lowering my Pearl-Rule rate from over half of all library books I pick up. This book, however, grabbed me and kept me reading, with interruptions for canoodling with my Young Gentleman Caller when he showed up to surprise me; I then was implored to make us some food in order to prevent his young body from wasting away. At least that's how he presented the situation to me, poor hungry lamb. Despite some dire flap copy (see above), which usually bodes ill for how I receive the book, I dove deep into the story before my starveling was all the way out my door (carrying a hunk of my homemade banana bread as insurance against recurrent malnourishment).

It's a great pity to me that there are only remnant hardcover copies of The King's Evil still available. Bunim & Bannigan, Helwig's Canadian publishers, don't appear to have the rights to this title as they don't list it for sale. But I'm realistic enough to sense that most people with any interest in the quiet pleasures of a bereaved-but-bereft unhusband's descent from grief into madness will most likely do as I did. The library is, in some places anyway, still the best resource for unusual and out-of-the-way older books.

Dross, as our hero is unsubtly named, is a CBC radio producer passing quickly through middle age. The CBC is a public broadcaster, as is the USA's NPR. Dross discovers his age and his long-term employment work against him for the first time. Unlike earlier eras, in the 1980s "market forces" began to be heeded in those previously secure, almost tenure-tracked, halls. He is peddling an idea for a series of shows on the oh-so-exciting world of art forgery, its detection, and the punishments meted out to the forgers.

Each artist has a signature that comes before his (sic) signature. ... An expert graphologist can always find a slight failure in any forged signature, for the handwriting is the exponential product of all the tiny differences of hand, arm, eye, brain.

Dross's equally middle-aged wife has recently jilted him for a hot young stud; at least that's what Dross thinks he is. (We never see him, or her for that matter, in any concrete setting. We have only Dross's narrative, therefore only his perception, of all other people he interacts with.) Her purpose in removing herself and her clothes, nothing else, from her marriage is that she is dying of cancer. She wishes to do so without her unloved husband hanging on her. Dross as rejected man as well as narrator is out of control from page one. We move vertiginously among the first, second, and third persons. We aren't ever on secure narrative footing—then again Dross isn't, either.

As Dross grapples with the heavy, slippery, unbalancing load that is his survivor's grief, his always vivid dream life spirals ever more widely. We're not given any more respite from the horrifying imagery of those dreams than he is. Down and down we go, landing briefly at some painful moment recalled surrealistically; imagination untrammeled by logic, and its effects on his mental health, bring us (reluctantly on my part) along as he delves deeply into the emotional and cultural roots of faking culturally significant objects for personal gain:

Forgery takes place, I've decided, at that mysterious point of intersection between fact and desire. Does it matter if the brush of El Greco touched a supposed El Greco once or a dozen times or a thousand? ... And yet something hangs on the difference between what is and what is not. Otherwise we would be at sea among impressions. Fact is the one defense against solipsism.

Author Helwig gives us this wonderful aperçu from the unsteady, trembling lips of a man unmoored from any reliable handle on reality. Its truth is both brighter and heavier than it would be coming from a more tightly wrapped individual than the disintegrating Dross, fearful for his job, worried about his mistily perceived loss of perspective on life, the universe, and everything.

While he's noodling over the idea for his forgery series...art forgery presented on the radio, that least visual of media...he's realistic enough to know what his hard-driving American-marketing-trained new boss is likely to think about the topic:

"You get a good hard-rock station and stick the speaker in your ear, and it goes straight to the little arteries in your balls. ... Sound that really hits people. Puts them back against the wall."

This is spoken to Dross over a lunch that's the moment when he is pushed out of his comfortable perch among the almost-tenured, ostensibly to grieve and find his emotional balance. He knows that his boss, who is always referred to as "Rand Nordstrom," his full name, wants the Old Guard civil servants like Dross to make way for more men like himself. This moment was so infuriatingly real to me; I remember 1984 as the rotten core of the Reagan Administration, a time of upheaval in the newly deregulated media markets. The Rand Nordstroms of that place and time ended up gifting us with Fox News and reality TV. Gone were the days of Edward R. Murrow making Harvest of Shame with CBS's full support, Woodward and Bernstein affecting in a positive way the course of the Watergate hearings with newspaper owner Katharine Graham's full support. Entertain, don't educate; obfuscate, don't elucidate. People are plumb tuckered out and don't need nothin' makin' 'em think! Advertisers want happy happy, joy joy.

We did not arrive at a world where Trump could get into the White House quickly, or by accident, and Dross's experiences in the 1980s media world illuminate a corner of that process.

Sorry, back to the book. Dross's mental health crisis assumes ever-larger proportions as he leaves the big city of Toronto to recuperate in Niagara, a Canadian version of Colonial Williamsburg. His cousin and her husband, successful entrepreneurs, are visiting the South of France and their Niagara house needs looking after for the winter. Being in a place where he never spent time with his no-longer wife has the curious effect on Dross of allowing his suppurating psychic abandonment wounds to erupt into a full-on break from reality. In his imaginings, or just possibly in his physical reality, Dross goes through a transformative series of events that bring to him objects, real solid objects, that carry clues shedding light on an historical mystery.

The Execution of Charles I has long been mooted to be a sham, with an impostor taking the King's place on the scaffold. There were sufficient oddities in the lead-up to the event, after the King's trial and conviction, that enabled this conspiracy theory to persist for over 350 years. And now Dross has obtained...in Niagara, Ontario, in 1984...undiscovered concrete evidence which could easily be interpreted as supporting the King's survival!

An actual, physical copy of a Royalist apologia called the Eikon Basilike or "Portrait of the King" circulated soon after Charles's execution. Dross, holding an ancient annotated copy of the text, reads the words purportedly written by the executed monarch:

Freedom, Moderation and impartialitie are sure the best tempers of reforming Councels, and endeavours; what is acted by Faction, cannot but offend more than it pleaseth.
And in the eighteenth-century (is it?) hand is written beside this and along the bottom of the page.
Hard words. He would take from Man what no man has ever agreed to give, and can never, without being less than Man.

Dross resonates to those words, finding in them a link to his personal predicament. His dreams take on a new and darker tinge as he absorbs the truth and wisdom and possibility he feels resident in his bizarre, concrete discovery.

In his ever-increasing excitement at uncovering more and more slight-but-real links in a chain of evidence that could lead to an American afterlife of sorts for the King, Dross begins a long physical and psychic journey to Virginia, then to London, and ultimately to Chester, rustling long-untouched papers and communing with long-forgotten scholars, nearly dead aristocrats, and his own fractured and betrayed emotions as King Charles replaces art forgers in his rabid obsessive drive to gain personal and historical perspective:

It was necessary to invent history in order to invent the future. The sense of necessity in Cromwell and Lenin (and even in Jefferson) springs from an obsession with time, change, an obsession with cause and effect that starts to make the effect seem like the cause of its own cause. The future is the cause of the past, and we play antiquarian games to reassure ourselves that the past is past and different so that we can believe that the future will be different too.

His arrival in Lord Firebrace's stately home is followed by some of the book's strangest, most disturbing dreams, narrated as always by a slightly breathless Dross. All through the novel he always seems to me just on the edge of an embarrassingly public as well as humiliatingly small erection. Dross, rejected by his wife as she faces her end of life, is what he always has been: a fat, weak kid. He narrates his horrifying, hard-to-read nightmare of youthful bullying by the sporty boys. It's amazing how graphic Author Helwig makes those bit players's language. It has an outsized impact on the reader because it's found nowhere else. Author Helwig couples this crudeness with the most refined cruelty aimed at breaking Dross utterly. He's aware now, as adult Dross, that had he been homosexual he could've understood why the boys beat him, reviled him, made him their bitch.

Do I need to say how much NO that brings up for me? We're talking about events that occurred in the 1950s, which is the only reason I didn't stop reading and Just Say No a la Nancy Reagan. I still found it extremely distasteful for Author Helwig to trot this ancient homophobia-makes-sense argument out. What saved the day, for me at least, was the equivocal nature of his invocation of homosexuals as weak, fat, effeminate...Dross is describing himself, using the prejudices of the day to hate himself, making his self-loathing into a rock on which he builds his identity:

I hesitate to have a bath in case the huge narcissist's mirror across from the tub catch my eye and force me to see my flabby body and scream at its inadequacies.

We shouldn't need to be beautiful.

He's a homely lardass; his wife, who in one of his flights of fancy (or possibly one of his memories) says of Dross that she never loved him; he finds no protest, no aggrieved denial of this horrible rejection. In fact he accepts that Nora (a name we see applied to his wife exactly once in the text) couldn't have loved him, no other woman ever has. His mother was simply damaged goods...several memories of her erratic, borderline schizophrenic, behaviors as he was growing up rang awful memory bells in my head...his beautiful cousin simply didn't bother to know who Dross is...his wife simply couldn't be bothered not to let him "have access to her body," never seeming to care about Dross's attentions.

And then one must bring to mind the fact that the entire book is, more or less, a perfect récit, that French form of simple tale told with a knowing, complicit smile, the narrator and the novelist and the reader all twined about each other's ankles and stumbling from event to event, lurching into dark, cobwebby corners...what a lot of incestuous fantasizing goes on here! what a lot of toxic-masculinity tropism gets deployed to damage the "weaker" characters!...while unfolding an emotional beach umbrella in the shower stall of fat, weak Dross's grief for himself.

He never once grieves for the dead wife. He is hurt by her rejection of him. He is wounded by her taking a studly young lover with a bigger member, a harder body; in the same vein he's hurt by boss Rand Nordstrom's go-getting rejection of the safe, stuffy, dull listener-unfriendly programming that the 1980s CBC no longer has room for, therefor no room for Dross. He's hurt in retrospect by his cousin the Niagara homeowner's past indifference to him, her present so far above his collapsing life that she wings away to France to escape the harsh winter cold her charity allows Dross to use her home as his (unsuccessful) escape from inward-growing ice. Dross exists to be rejected. He cannot fathom his good fortune, his slight-but-real discoveries of clues to an historical event of huge importance. As he gets closer and closer to his search's object...so close he knows where it is but not what to look for...

The ending of the novel doesn't weave the threads together in a neat, orderly pattern. The ending resembles threads from multiple skeins of yarn in just slightly clashing colors wound around each other in a strangely satisfying rope. Soft yarn, rough yarn, thinner and thicker and worn-out threads, wind about each other and vanish into the heart of the rope, emerging briefly at intervals determined by a sundial not a mechanical clock. Dross, dead wife and absent cousin and inaccessible mother carried on his shoulders, reaches across time and slings his malformed and misshapen rope at King Charles I. He catches a prong of the royal crown, drags at it with a feeble victory cry smothered under the women he carries but from whom he never receives any attention.

But Dross has forgotten: The world's first executed, not assassinated or murdered, monarch lost his crown-bearing head.

The human mind exists in chaos and is in love with meaning, so historians go back again and again to try to turn the multitudinous resistant facts into a story.

I never forgot or forgave the casual homophobia or misogyny, the reduction of women to objects of incestuous desire; but Dross's extraordinarily average life is worthy of this tale's beauties. With them come the author's craft failings and imaginative limitations. Imperfect. Ungainly even. But so was Frankenstein, teller, tale, and monster.

Seek this story out and your hoard of facts will be increased.

COMING THROUGH: THREE NOVELLAS, late-career excellence from a CanLit monadnock

COMING THROUGH: THREE NOVELLAS
DAVID HELWIG
Bunim & Bannigan Ltd (non-affiliate Amazon link)
from $7.99 hardcover, available from various sellers

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Writer David Helwig's place in Canadian Letters spans practically every realm, from novels, short fiction, poetry, and plays, to essays and reportage. Helwig is one of the generation of writers including Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje to achieve wide critical acclaim and popular following in Canada. Even so, Helwig remains virtually unknown in the United States. Bunim & Bannigan is pleased to present for the first time Coming Through, a unique collection of three tightly crafted novellas of remarkable variety and versatility. These wise, whimsical, and mordantly funny stories by an under-appreciated master writing in his favorite genre are sure to delight American readers.

My Review: When I discovered Author Helwig had left us behind, it was at the same time the moment I discovered he had been among us for 80 years. I peruse Wikipedia's obituaries daily, always keeping a weather eye out for departed literary lights. I am a CanLit fancier from the get-go, and was thus enticed to click further when I saw that Helwig was an eminent Canadian. His stub entry informed me that he had worked for the CBC's television drama department, that he had seventeen volumes of poetry (!), twenty-five works of fiction, two collections of essays, a memoir, and a work of narrative non-fiction to his credit, and in a career that spanned forty-five years, that he had even translated Chekhov!

Yet I had never even seen him referred to on a US or Canadian "greatest" list, run across one of his books at the Strand, or so much as heard his name.

I live in a wonderful place where my local library is happy to bring me books from all over Long Island. Luckily for me the Nassau County libraries serve 1.4 million people so they have a pretty extensive shared collection. What one of the county's various libraries doesn't have is frequently available in the larger county next door, Suffolk, with its 1.5 million people. I sallied forth to the Long Beach Library's ALIScat site and, after discovering there were several Helwig titles available, eenie-meenied this one. I was favorably impressed with this late-career effort.

I am not surprised Helwig is unknown in the US after reading it, however. These are excellent pieces, well made, but of the literary world's least popular (read: slowest selling) area: The Quiet Room. There are no pyrotechnics here. Helwig committed the sin of being born male, so he had no natural constituency lobbying for him to receive his rightful share of attention as did fellow short-fiction mavens Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant. I knowingly commit literary heresy when I say this: He's every bit as talented and accomplished a storyteller as either of them.

Perhaps I have never grown beyond my young days, when every attractive young girl was a promise of the paradise garden, when I expected so much, gladdened by an eyebrow, a nose, a hank of hair, a breast, falling in love twice a day, never satisfied.

A great splash of roses...with that self-satisfied air that florist's roses always have, cosmetic abundance, the cryogenic look of a movie star after a successful facelift.

These from The Man Who Finished Edwin Drood
This short work is a uniformly excellent telling of the wages of sin. We are all monads, singular and indivisible units of universal life, for when we are divided, we are destroyed. "Wicked Uncle" (and how quickly that self-description palled!) learns, re-learns, ultimately owns his wholeness as his wronged predecessor, his wife's "starter husband" so to speak, dies in his home while in the guest room next to him.

Proceeding to some more man-centered prose, I offer:

Now the necktie is growing more unusual...to see three striped ones in this audience is odd almost to the point of that one might consider it ominous. ... Three strips of stripes from the drunken brush of God.

...{L}ife, as we all know, is not a story at all. It is the music of no mind.

I expect that the striped ties will return for the end of the last lecture, as they were here for the beginning of the first. Their pattern of presence and departure is unreadable, but all truth is unreadable until it is the heap of dead facts we call history.

These are from The Music of No Mind
A story that's so deeply sad...a has-been (really a never-was) old lecturer in art history delivers three hours of talk over three nights. He speaks about all his hobby-horses, including the rotter whose death got him the gig, who once upon a time stole his wife. Richly allusive, gorgeously pictorial, utterly incomprehensible to one unlearned in the culture of the midcentury & its roots in the Belle Epoque. It badly needs illustrations! The artworks referenced in it won't be familiar to any but those unusually informed about the visual arts.

Finally, I offer these gems:

Moods, the weather of heart and soul.

A vain, foolish man, but weren't they all? Open their zippers and their brains fall out.

Chosen from A Prayer for the Absent
It is the longest, and to my mind least successful, of the novellas. I wasn't a big fan of Carman Deshane or of Norma; they carry the story, so that's a problem. These two people are well-matched adversaries. Carman's heart is weak; Norma's body got away from her somehow. In the end, they find some end-of-life peace in their sparring. Kind of a modern All in the Family Archie and Edith. I found those two tiresome forty-plus years ago, and their constant bickering was one of the biggest things that shoved me away from regular TV watching for twenty-five years.

All in all, the many pleasures I found in all three novellas outweighed the slight but real annoyances of unwanted nostalgia in the last one. I'd recommend these tales to a reader with a wide range of interests, a person whose acquaintance with Culture of the capital-C variety is solid. Or, just to be sure I spread the tent wide, someone unafraid of using Google to maximize the impact of a leisurely read.

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!

IF OUR WEALTH IS CRIMINAL THEN LET'S LIVE WITH THE CRIMINAL JOY OF PIRATES: Small book with *really* long title

IF OUR WEALTH IS CRIMINAL THEN LET'S LIVE WITH THE CRIMINAL JOY OF PIRATES
JACOB WREN
Book*hug/A Boondoggle Book
$10.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From multidisciplinary artist and author Jacob Wren comes a small book of big ideas. Originally produced as a 'Boondoggle Book' limited edition specifically for the first Authors for Indies Day in Toronto, this small and delightful book is a must-have for fans of the author of POLYAMOROUS LOVE SONG (named one of the top 100 books of 2014 by The Globe and Mail). IF OUR WEALTH IS CRIMINAL THEN LET'S LIVE WITH THE CRIMINAL JOY OF PIRATES collects two short stories and an essay by Jacob Wren. In the first story, 'The Infiltrator, ' certain ongoing, rarely mentioned, difficulties for the activist Left are explored with unlikely candour. In 'Four Letters from an Ongoing Series, ' the postal service becomes an unwitting accomplice to the gatekeepers of potential culture. Finally, in the essay 'Like a Priest Who Has Lost Faith, ' questions of art and emptiness shift focus in relation to the agency that at all times surrounds us.

My Review: As always with story collections, I'll offer specific comments on the stories themselves and finish up with some wise (or wise-ass) summing up. Without further ado, I deploy the Bryce Method's time-tested techniques:

The Infiltrator is either the shortest récit I've ever seen or it's a short story with the same intimate effect as a récit because we never get out of our nameless narrator's head. It's more effective at greater length, in my opinion, but there is nothing wrong with the story's story. It's fascinating to look at an agent provocateur's strange mental state. The money? The cause? I can't imagine. The narrator's account of his actions are without emotional responses; the narrator records the emotions of the people she or he is manipulating without attempting to respond to them personally. Curiously, I found this more telling of the narrator's character than any more noisy declaration could have. This is an amoral person. This is the bad seed your mother warned you about. 4 stars

Four Letters from an Ongoing Series details the dreary, pointless existence (it's not in any way describable as a life) of an aspiring writer. From information within the frame of the story, he sounds like a white, middling-aged bore who has never escaped the analysis paralysis that a liberal arts education can put some people in:

I hate it when I feel like a man. It is probably even worse when I don't, since those are times when I am coasting through territory where my privilege is even more invisible to me than usual.

Self awareness? Or narcissistic navel-gazing? Both in some degree?

His manuscript, one assumes the same one each time, is rejected by four presses. Each letter he receives is more explicit about why they aren't publishing it. Midway through this painful process of absorbing so much rejection, he ruminates on the very business he's trying to enter:

Will literature last forever or is it practically already a thing of the past? And how do we even define literature, since without some definition it is barely possible to judge the field's relative health or disrepair. Are my overly refined tastes--predelictions and preferences I've spent most of a lifetime overly refining--the most useful criteria or do they pertain only to my personal idiosyncrasies? Would it be better to have something more generalized, a canon most might agree upon, or would this very canon simply be a dampening force, pushing down the lid, creating conventions through consensus both more consensual and more conventional?

If he writes the way he thinks, no wonder his manuscript bounces back to him so often. Yeah, all of that blahblahblah is true and valid. But outside an academic journal or a classroom this is some seriously dreary verbiage.

The last rejection letter is a rant of epic proportions, ordering the narrator to go out and live, to get his head out of his butt and maybe then he'd have something other than his pathetic life to write about. However good this order is, what a difference it might have made...human nature wins. 3.5 stars

Like a Priest Who Has Lost Faith: Notes on art, meaning, emptiness and spirituality really doesn't need more explanation than the instruction "read that title again and reflect carefully on how it can relate to the subtitle" and this paragraph from the text:

I wonder if the framework within which most contemporary art attempts to generate meaning is analogous to the 'never been modern' framework that {Bruno} Latour criticizes {in his major work, We Have Never Been Modern}. Art is a world that separates, continuously playing the divisions against one another in ways that are often contradictory: good art against bad art, art against everything else, political art against commerce, etc. The gallery is the place for art, but it is also a way of removing art from the rest of life.

Has Wren lost faith in the idea of modernity? The art exhibition that elicited this essay from him was called 'Animism,' a group of works in multiple media by artist Anselm Francke. Wren tells us he didn't actually see the exhibition, only read the catalogue; how amazing must this show have been to make a very intelligent man dig so deeply into his psyche and gift us with this revealing, delicious meditation on humanity and our endless search for meaning.

I read this book, slim but deep, in an hour of happy immersion. It's been my introduction to Jacob Wren, and to BookThug's very, very interesting publishing program. Apart from two pet peeves (stationAry instead of stationEry; it's instead of its), this is a tight and involving package of words. It's going to be even more fun for me to read Wren's novels now. I am looking forward to it, and I suspect many other readers will be right there with me. 5 stars