Oft Imitated — When I lived in Toronto some 15 years ago, I took Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Other Stories out of the library. I wanted to read “The Lottery” and see what all the fuss was about since I had read that that particular short story was controversial when it was…

Kitchen Sink Realism — When I was in my 20s, I briefly dated a woman named Whitney who had a five-year-old son. At some point in this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it relationship, we had a conversation predicated on the idea of who would Whitney rescue if me and her son were drowning. She said she would go…

Lucky Number 13 — Even though Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole police detective series has run for 13 novels now and has been adapted into one 2017 film, I must admit that I’ve never heard of these books and their protagonist — although its author has made bestseller lists. Thus, I must say that it…

Octopus’s Garden — I was attracted to Ray Nayler’s impressive The Mountain in the Sea — which goes into trade paperback at the end of May 2023 — by the fact that the work had been blurbed by two science-fiction authors whose work I greatly appreciate and admire: Jeff VanderMeer and Charlie Jane…

The American Invasion (of Canada) — Camp Zero is one of those books that has inevitably gotten compared to Emily St. John Mandel’s now classic novel Station Eleven. And the jaded reader could sigh at this because there has been a lion’s share of books that have been influenced directly by Station Eleven: The Wolves of…

Right Next Door to Stephen King Country — The setting of Shannon Bowring’s impressive debut, The Road to Dalton, will be familiar to most readers of Stephen King’s classic horror novels — though there’s not much horror to be had here unless one is referring to the domestic home-life kind. (As an aside, this is a book that…

The Absurdity of War — The recent history of Afghanistan has been tumultuous, to say the least. I know firsthand. When Canada was still fighting the War on Terror in the country, I was involved with a Canadian government aid organization that strove to educate people about changing conditions there. Still, things were fraught with…

Ghosts of the Past — Andrew Hind’s Ghost Towns of Ontario’s Cottage Country was not quite the book I was expecting, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As a former resident of Barry’s Bay, Ontario, I thought the “cottage country” related to the book’s title would apply to the area where I grew up…

The Sobering Truth — It turns out that I might have been wrong. This is the conclusion that I’ve reached after reading Truth Telling, a work by an Indigenous author of Canada named Michelle Good (Five Little Indians). This is a collection of seven essays ranging from issues such as residential schools to missing…