The Fear Room

Sarah Robertson is the trade, scholarly, and reference editor of the
Canadian Book Review Annual.

This fourth collection of stories by Toronto writer Margaret Gibson
revolves around the unpleasant themes of violence, obsession, madness,
loss, and deprivation. Each of the six tales documents the harrowing
lives of people in crisis.

In “Miss Alice Ellis in Wonderland,” a laid-off welfare officer
becomes ensnared in the poverty trap and finds herself on the receiving
end of the same bureaucratic callousness (“We do not make policy”)
she once dispensed to her own clients. The deeply disturbed heroine of
“Charting the Nile” becomes romantically obsessed with her analyst
and wages an escalating campaign of harassment against a woman she
mistakes for his wife. In “The Fear Room,” a woman and her toddler
son suffer the degradations of grinding poverty and appalling brutality
at the hands of the woman’s boyfriend. (This horrific and apparently
autobiographical tale is dedicated to the author’s son and to
“Kenneth M., May you rot in Hell.”) In “The Nothing Book,” a
dying cancer patient struggles to find meaning beyond “space blackness
going on forever with cold planets turning like stones in the
blackness.” A woman who was terrorized by her ex-husband wreaks bloody
vengeance on another man in “Out-Takes.” In the final story,
“Christmas Gifts,” a meeting between a woman and man known as “The
Good Neighbor” ends in violence.

A particular strength of this collection is its unflinching depiction
of poverty and its corrosive effects. Some readers will shrink from
Gibson’s relentlessly bleak urban landscapes; others will be seduced
by the integrity of her vision, and by the daring, poetic language with
which she expresses it.