One remarkable feature of Lisa Moore’s short story writing is her versatility. Sometimes her vocabulary is elevated (consider: koan, ferric, sculpin, recalcitrant, scabrous, and histrionic). Sometimes her subject matter is banal. With characters chewing their fish and chips on Signal Hill with their mouths full. (“Skywalk”, the final work
It’s fitting that a story which includes the visionary figure of Buckminster Fuller is rooted in possibility rather than history: “It is not intended to follow the precise history of what was, but rather to imagine a story that might have been.” This note precedes the novel and sets
June is at the heart of this collection of stories; she is the link, the thread of light through a series of dark scenes. She is our guide to the ‘burbs: “The picture perfect suburban dream with the groomed lawns, nine-to-five jobs, 2.5 children kind of places. Domino effect.
If The Cat’s Table (2011) was a slow and steady unravelling of a young boy’s memories, yarn taut and tidy, Warlight is a mass of moth-eaten fragments, remnants of a finely-crafted woollen garment pulled from a trunk. A thing of beauty, yes, but the devastation is the first thing
Thumps Dreadfulwater. That’s his Indian name. No, wait, that’s his actual name. Which is when you know that you are not, actually, in Chinook, where Thumps Dreadfulwater solves cases. You are in Thomas King country. Readers of King’s An Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North
