Canadian Short Fiction Anthology, Volume 2

Marily Chapman was a freelance writer living in Kitchener, Ontario.

This is the second and final volume in Intermedia’s short-Canadian-fiction series, and the Vancouver-based press deserves commendation for providing a total of 63 writers (28 in this volume) with a vehicle designed to reach a much larger audience than that offered by the little magazines. Like the first volume (edited by Cathy Ford), this one presents a wide variety of fictional forms and styles typical of all that is new and exciting in Canada today. I wish I could say “the best of what is new and exciting,” but I can’t. There is a “flatness” to too many of the entries that betrays the hand of the amateur. Nevertheless, there are several notable exceptions.

Unlike Ford, Paul Belserene has wisely chosen to include a few established writers in his collection: W.P. Kinsella returns to the world of Silas and Sadie One-Wound in his superb “Suits”; Valgardson proves that he is still master of the threatening encounter in his vignette, “Identities”; and Leon Rooke skillfully takes us into the phantasmagoric thoughts of “Sixteen Year Old Susan March [Who] Confesses to the Innocent Murder of All the Devious Strangers Who Would Drag Her Down.” The title itself deserves a prize!

Of the stories by less well known writers, I also enjoyed Percy’s “Mankipoo,” West’s “Uncle Harry Is Dead,” Baliozian’s “Organ Recital,” Simmie’s “Emily,” and Zonailo’s “Making It.” And Crad Kildoney’s “My Posthumous Fame” is hilarious. While many of the other selections had obtrusive flaws, a number of them exhibited a kind of power that is difficult to define. Schroeder’s “Breakfast at Minnie’s Pit,” for instance, describes Steve Jefferson’s midnight excursion in a fibreglass boat, down into a flaming pit of garbage — “just for the hell of it.” The plot is unbelievable and the style cumbersome (“a small cacophony of dog barks hung like a brief blossom of mammalian sound in the air”). And yet there is something about that madcap descent that haunted my imagination for days after I’d read it. No doubt Dante deserves some of the credit — but not all of it.

An interesting, but not memorable, collection.