Mahoney in Control and Other Stories

Boyd Holmes is an editor with Dundurn Press.

The short stories that comprise David Monroe’s first book concern
themselves with modern North America’s moral underside. Mahoney in
Control is populated by such diverse yet uniformly repellent people as
racists, thieves, bigots, bums, and killers. None of these stories have
appeared previously, with the exception of “Marathon Man,” which won
a 1986 Toronto Star short-story contest.

This book’s cover claims that Monroe’s tales will establish him as
one of Canada’s best young authors. In fact, Monroe is less of a
literary giant: his prose is clumsy, blunt, and often unintentionally
hilarious. What is more, his characters use too much slang, poor
grammar, and foul language; this overuse of bad English makes his
fiction forced.

This young author might study the prose of Raymond Carver, a writer
whose underside stories are invariably elegant, controlled, and tightly
edited.