Lodestone: Stories by Regina Writers

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

This is a collection of 31 stories from 23 writers. They vary in length
from extremely short to moderately long (a dozen pages). They vary just
as greatly in accomplishment, ranging from pieces that are distressingly
clumsy and stilted to works that are highly accomplished. This review
will highlight the better stories in the collection.

Dianne Warren’s “Big Otis and Little Otis” concerns a love
triangle that never really exists, except in the mind of a jealous and
insecure woman; the story, which is elegiac in tone, is told from the
point of view of the woman who is wrongly suspected by her friend. Dave
Margoshes’s “Scars” is also about relationships, in this case a
marriage in which a husband helps his doctor wife through a crisis;
ironically, his strength comes from adopting a stereotypical male role.

Connie Gault and Ken Mitchell explore situations in which insanity
suddenly impinges on ordinary life. In Gault’s “The Man Who Followed
His Hand,” an obviously disturbed man follows a suburban housewife
home and disrupts the barbecue she and her husband are hosting for a
group of middle-class suburban friends. In Mitchell’s “State
Border,” a clergyman stops at a truckstop in Nebraska, witnesses a
multiple murder, and barely escapes with his own life. In both stories,
the writers do an excellent job of creating that chilling feeling that
can permeate normal situations gone awry.

Ven Begamudré’s “Gandhi Himself” reads like a part of a much
longer realistic comic novel set in India, and leaves the reader wanting
more. Finally, in “Grasshopper Stew,” Alison Lohans shows the
difficulties of a two-career couple with children; the tone is comic
with serious overtones—and yes, the mother really does serve her
family grasshopper stew.

While the inclusion of some of the weaker stories is unfortunate, there
are at least half a dozen top-drawer stories in this collection, which
do more than justify its existence.