Tacones (High Heels)

Ian C. Nelson is assistant director of libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan, and président de la Troupe du Jour, Regina Summer Stage.

This nasty little book—the winner of Anvil Press’s 19th Annual
Labour Day Weekend 3-Day Novel Writing Contest—is about a number of
marginalized people who congregate at an after-hours club called Tacones
(high heels). The cast of characters (to be immortalized on film,
according to the author’s blurb) includes transvestite hookers and a
couple who murder their scurvy-ridden baby in order to “click back to
the connection they had before.”

The narration does its best to remain cool in the midst of high
anxiety: “The Lake Ontario baby deposit went smoothly.” Each two- to
four-page chapter includes a date, but the chapters are not in
chronological order. The author invests his spare and grotesque
narrations with occasional touches of irony to maintain the reader’s
interest in the grisly theme of infanticide to the end.