All the Way to Aceldama

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Dodic, a 30-year-old Ontarian, has moved around some since coming to
Canada from Belgrade at the age of three. He has resided in Los Angeles,
Montreal, Dublin, and Detroit, before settling in Toronto. Along the
way, he has developed a stinging, cryptic sensibility, manifested most
pungently in his character descriptions. Dodic writes, for instance,
about a friend: his dad’s a midget, or a dwarf, I’m not a racist, or
whatever it is when you hate midgets. I just hate his dad.” Fathers,
dwarfs, and nearly everyone else take a beating in Aceldama, Dodic’s
fictional city. Another “dad” “sold his house, motorboat and car,
and [sank] the money into a carnival, the old-fashioned kind. He changed
his name to Earl and grew a handlebar mustache. He hired fourteen fat
ladies and a dogfaced boy.”

Dodic’s writing is sparse and imagistic. These 18 biting,
epigrammatic stories, never more than one or two pages long, are
cathartic (probably) for the writer, assaultive for the reader.
Undercurrents of sexual abuse, patricide, and misogyny hover in the
margins. The circus freaks who appear in a few stories are mentioned in
many others, and lend a sense of surreal foreboding to the collection.
Recommended, but not for the squeamish.