Black Tulips

Elizabeth St. Jacques is a writer and poet living in Sault Ste. Marie,
Ontario.

In the 1990 fiction anthology Made in Manitoba, Eason’s “Away on a
Different Bus Somewhere Besides Here,” which deals with a grandmother
and mother’s concerns about healthy bowels, left this reader choking
with laughter. What a delight, then, to find this story included in
Eason’s first collection of 29 short stories.

Eason’s stark world has no room for sentimentality; his vision is
clear, strong, and sometimes chilling, but rarely does his message miss
the target of truth. For example, in “My First Funeral,” when a
woman feigns grief over her husband’s death, her young grandson’s
fear of death is abruptly lost in the face of this disgusting
demonstration of hypocrisy, while in “Elroy and the Folks Upstairs,”
a concerned citizen who reports a wife-beater to the police discovers
that good intentions can sometimes be a source of sorrow.

Throughout this collection, Eason proves that he understands only too
well the demons one carries through life after a psychological trauma.
One of the most striking examples of this appears in “The
Antitoxin,” in which the protagonist suffers a horrifying childhood
experience; Eason leads the reader through this man’s sad and lonely
life with an understanding of his every thought and action that the best
of psychiatrists would envy.

Humor ranges from gentle to outrageous; some can make you groan
(“What They Did to Tommy Trip’s Dog” concerns a dead dog being
used in a baseball game), while some can chill the blood. But Eason’s
way with words usually hits the reader in all the right places.
There’s something here for every mood.