Coming Attractions 90

Boyd Holmes is an editor with Dundurn Press.

Coming Attractions 90 is the eleventh annual edition of a short-fiction
anthology series that devotes itself to the work of three new Canadian
story writers in each issue. Of this year’s authors—poet Steven
Heighton, journalist Peter Stockland, and newcomer Sara
McDonald—Heighton is the most topical: two of his three pieces are set
in Japan, and profit from an acute understanding of that country.
However, the analogies in both stories are too obvious to allow for
memorable fiction. Heighton’s third story, which takes place in
Ontario, fails because of its awkward flow and pointless shifts from a
first-person to a third-person narrative. Stockland also tries to be
topical: the first of his three fictions displays a fair knowledge of
social tensions in contemporary Quebec. Nonetheless, he fatally wounds
the story by presenting its extensive dialogue in French, thereby
frustrating readers who do not know the language and making the story
seem forced. The characters in Stockland’s other two pieces are
insufficiently realized: the stories’ tragedies therefore lack their
needed impact. McDonald, who is allotted four fictions, emerges in all
of them as a pretentious and preachy writer (“I was thinking of what
pain we once brought each other as we were grasping for joy”). An
engaging humor does, however, partly redeem her prose, particularly in
the opening section of “the rosetta stone.”

Despite their differences, these authors are all, in one sense,
representative of most Coming Attractions writers: the quality of their
prose is, at best, lukewarm. Indeed, the anthologies’ respective
titles have, for the most part, lied: so far, only four of the series’
30 previous authors—Sharon Batala, Dayv James-French, Frances Itani,
and Rohinton Mistry—have proceeded to noteworthy careers. This causes
at least one reviewer to ask that Coming Attractions stop. It is too
much to expect a small country to produce 30 important writers every
decade.