Category: Fiction Book Reviews

December 29, 2014

Chilly Renewal

A review of Dominik Parisien’s “My Child Has Winter in His Bones” in Tesseracts Seventeen: Speculating Canada From Coast to Coast (Edge, 2013) By Derek Newman-Stille In My Child Has Winter in His Bones, Dominik Parisien evokes his characteristic blend of the human and the landscape, amalgamating a child with the icy lake where his parent fishes. Like much of...

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December 27, 2014

Feeding the Homeless

A review of Trevor Shikaze’s “The Harbour Bears” in Lackington’s issue 4 ( http://lackingtons.com/2014/10/28/the-harbour-bears-by-trevor-shikaze/ ) By Derek Newman-Stille Homeless people are treated as human refuse, ignored when possible, and when not possible, treated as a social problem that requires police intervention and forced removal. Homeless people evoke a sense of horror partially because they remind society that the price for...

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December 24, 2014

Asymmetrical

A review of Kate Heartfield’s “Bonsaiships of Venus” in Lackington’s issue 4 ( http://lackingtons.com/2014/10/28/bonsaiships-of-venus-by-kate-heartfield/ ) By Derek Newman-Stille When most envision the space-faring future, they tend to picture sleek space ships that are ideal forms of symmetry. This is why it is so refreshing to see Kate Heartfield’s notion of bonsaiships, space vehicles that are trimmed like bonsai trees over...

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December 17, 2014

A Love Letter to Story-telling

A Review of Helen Marshall’s Gifts for the One Who Comes After (ChiZine Publications, 2014) By Derek Newman-Stille Helen Marshall’s “Gifts for the One Who Comes After” is her love letter to storytelling. Marshall examines the way that we are shaped by the tales we tell ourselves and the stories that are told about us. She reminds the reader that...

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December 14, 2014

Witching Perceptions

A Review of Helen Marshall’s “Secondhand Magic” in “Gifts for the One Who Comes After” (ChiZine Publications, 2014) By Derek Newman-Stille Childhood and the desire for magic are something that we have constructed as intertwined in our Disneyfied society, seeing magic as a manifestation of imagination which we relegate almost exclusively to the realm of children and a few eccentric...

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December 12, 2014

Mute Ghost in a World of Words

A review of S.M. Beiko’s The Lake and the Library (ECW Press, 2013) By Derek Newman-Stille S.M. Beiko’s The Lake and the Library is nominally a story about growing up, and the feeling of nostalgia for things lost and things changing. It is about the discovery of a library filled with books that are gateways to fantastic worlds, pages that...

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December 9, 2014

RagnaROCKING Manitoba: The Road to Hel

A review of Chadwick Ginther’s Tombstone Blues (RavenStone, 2013). By Derek Newman-Stille This second book in the Thunder Road trilogy takes a turn toward the dark. The dead have risen, and Thor, who has been sitting in Hel since Ragnarok… has become dark and twisted by years of post-mortem torture. When Thor encounters Ted Callan, the first thing he notices...

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November 28, 2014

Ectoplasmopocalypse

A review of Orrin Grey’s “Persistence of Vision” in Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post Apocalypse (Exile Editions, 2014) By Derek Newman-Stille Shaped by movie imagery with comparisons of the events of the story to a Hollywood film, Orrin Grey’s Persistence of Vision uses the unreality of film to contribute to the notion of an apocalypse that no one believes...

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November 26, 2014

The Horror of Childhood Logic

A review of Helen Marshall’s “Lessons in the Raising of Household Objects” in Gifts for the One Who Comes After (ChiZine Publications, 2014) By Derek Newman-Stille In “Lessons in the Raising of Household Objects” , Helen Marshall illustrates for us the horror of a child’s logic. Convinced that the twins her mother is carrying are probably dead, the narrator, Angela,...

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November 14, 2014

Spin The Bottle With Death

A review of Helen Marshall’s “Death and the Girl from Pi Delta Zeta” in Gifts For The One Who Comes After (ChiZine Publications, 2014). By Derek Newman-Stille In horror films, sorority girls have a metaphorical relationship with death, perpetually constructed as figures who are courted by death. Helen Marshall, demonstrating her characteristic desire to play with tropes to disempower, subvert,...

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