22. Frankenstein: The Graphic Novel

By Mary Shelley (Published 2009 by Classical Comics)

21. Holes

By Louis Sachar

My daughter really enjoyed Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game and requested more mystery books for her birthday. I googled "best YA mystery books like The Westing Game" and Louis Sachar's Holes showed up as one of 'em.

The kid gulped down Holes (and The Tattooed Potato) not long after her birthday, learned in the afterword a movie adaptation exists and promptly informed her parents that we should all watch it as a family. Her bookish parents said, well, maybe we should read the book first... well, after trying to wait patiently for about a week, she pretty much demanded that we watch Holes for our movie night (double-billed with my choice for Gremlins 2 since Halloween was approaching).

I had never in my life heard of Holes the movie before, so I was a little wary until I saw some raving Letterboxd reviews. We were all pleasantly surprised at how good the movie was. I realize now the love for this movie comes from Millennials who grew up with Holes. For Gen X parents with a Gen Z kid, this made an excellent family movie.

I ended up reading Holes about a couple of weeks later, and I can now say the movie adaptation was surprisingly faithful to the novel.  It kept the non-linear structure where it jumped back in time to Stanley’s great-great-grandfather and back to current events and then back to the story of Kissin Kate Barlow and Sam the Onion Seller.  I was surprised that the Warden’s snake venom-tainted nail polish scene was in the book – it was so nasty how she scratched Mr Sir’s face with her painted nails!

I might as well write a quick summary:  Stanley lives in a big city and gets caught with a stolen pair of used shoes donated by a famous baseball player, only he didn't steal them.  He gets sent to a remote detention centre in the middle of nowhere that's overseen by the Warden, a wealthy woman whose family has owned the land for generations.  It's called Camp Green Lake because there used to be a lake over a century ago but it's now just parched barren desert.  The boys are all forced to dig one big hole each day to "build character" but there is a nefarious reason that only the Warden knows.  The land is perforated with hundreds and hundreds of five-foot wide and five-foot deep holes.  Stanley gradually gets used the physical demands of the daily hole-digging and becomes one of the boys.  He makes friends with the very quiet Zero, a very bright but illiterate boy. We also learn that Stanley had a great-great-grandfather in Latvia who was cursed by a fortune teller before he immigrated to America because he broke a promise. When Stanley's great-great-grandfather was travelling from New York to Texas, he was robbed by Kiss Kate Barlow.  Ever since then, Stanley's family has always had bad luck.  Stanley's father is a struggling inventor obsessed with finding a cure for foot odor.  When Stanley finds a small object in one of his digs, this sets off a chain of events.  The reader gradually learns that there is a connection between Stanley's family history, the barren land at Camp Green Lake, the Warden, and the boy known as Zero.  Some adventure ensues, and everything gets explained at the end with a satisfying conclusion.

One main difference was that Clyde Livingston was a baseball player in the book, while in the movie, he was a basketball star (which actually makes more sense as basketball has become the more popular sport).  The ending was also slightly different.  In the movie, the storm scene was made more dramatic by having it rain down on all the characters at the Camp Green Lake compound.  In the book, the rain only started as Stanley and Zero/Hector were driving away from Camp Green Lake in the lawyer’s car.

The book was as enjoyable and fun as the movie.  There are many characters and a lot of stuff going on with the nonlinear plot that is fairly complex for a YA novel.  Sachar mentioned how it was important for him to make it digestible and appealing for a 10-11 year old, and he pretty much succeeds in tying up all the loose ends.  I can now understand why my daughter was so impatient to watch the movie after she finished the book.  I heard that Sigourney Weaver wanted to star in Holes the movie because her daughter was also a big fan.

Louis Sachar seems like a genuinely nice, personable guy.  I liked his notes at the end, when he mentioned how Holes was very popular at juvenile detention centers, and he’d received fan mail from the kids there.  He also admitted that he only learned that you can’t actually dig a hole 5 feet deep and 5 feet wide using a five-foot shovel until the movie was being made. There was no room for the actors to swing their shovels!

20. Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror & Speculative Fiction

By Lisa Kröger and Melanie Anderson

19. The Starless Sea

By Erin Morgenstern

18. The Westing Game

By Ellen Raskin

17. Through The Woods

By Emily Carroll

16. The Ant World Chronicles

By JH

15. Night Shift

By Stephen King

14. Silver Nitrate

By Silvia Moreno-Garcia 

13. Out

By Natsuo Kirino

12. Silverwing: the graphic novel

By Kenneth Oppel (illustrated by Christopher Steininger)

Since she's been able to read, I've borrowed tons and tons of comics and graphic novels from the Mordecai Richler library for my 11 yo daughter.  Many of them are series, and very occasionally she'll go to me and say, can you get me the next book? as she wants to find out what happens next. 

I've heard of the Silverwing series of books by Kenneth Oppel, but didn't know much about them.  My daughter hadn't read the books yet so when I saw the graphic novel at the library last week, I just signed it out, as I wasn't sure if my daughter would be interested in reading the whole series. Besides, the graphics looked intriguing (like Watership Down, but with bats!) and the illustrations were dope.  

Then last Sunday, as I was helping her out of the bath, she told me, you know that book you got from the library, Silverwing?  It was really good.  I was like oh yeah?  And she launched into a brief summary of the story about this bat colony and how they were at war with the birds, etc. etc.

I told her the graphic novel is actually based on a real book, and there are a whole series of them, but this graphic novel is just the first one, and it came out in 2023.  Would you be interested in reading the actual books?  She goes, sure, I guess.  Which is her way of expressing interest.  So cool!  Now I just have to search out the Silverwing series of books now!  Maybe we'll find some while used book hunting in Vancouver!

And my curiosity was piqued, so I picked up the graphic novel and was able to read it at a leisurely pace in two days.  It was a very exciting adventure story about a runty bug-eating Silverwing bat named Shade who gets separated from his colony while they were migrating south for the winter.  He meets a Brightwing bat named Marina who helps him on his journey to catch up with his colony.  There's background info about the ancient conflict between the owls and the bats, as well as bat lore and legend.  But the main narrative is on Shade and Marina get into various mishaps and misadventures, including getting themselves involved with two scary giant carnivorous jungle bats who turn out to be evil monsters who have no issue eating "lesser" bats.  

The illustrations of the Goth and Throb's bloody goblin-esque faces as they ate their prey and fought with Shade and Marina were really amazing.  And when Shade and Marina saw all the metal bands lining the edge of Goth and Throb's wings - which meant that they must have EATEN all the human-worshipping barn bats!

Although I enjoyed the story immensely, it didn't make me want to seek out the original books to read.  However, I will encourage my daughter to read them so she can explain to me what happens next!

11. Black Star, Bright Dawn

By Scott O'Dell

10. Kid Power! (Spectacular Optical Book One)

Edited by Kier-La Janisse & Paul Corupe

9. Yellowface

By R.F. Kuang

8. The Main: Portrait of a Neighbourhood

By Edward Hillel

I came across Edward Hilel’s The Main quite by chance, really.  My daughter has known her BFF since daycare. BFF’s parents are now separated, but they have a circle of friends who regularly hang out at Parc du Bullion, drinking beer and McAdams cider.  They’re comprised of parents from the neighbourhood and/or people who frequented the Parc JM softball games and/or the dep on Duluth and Clark.  

 

Hubs and I are not super social with them, but we’d sometimes hang out there when the girls are together, and the BFF’s parents would often bring their charcoal grill and host BBQs to celebrate a family member’s birthday.  This last time, we got together for a Sunday Easter egg hunt at the park. 

Long-haired Craig showed up and brought along a hardbound book of black and white photographs  titled The Main, which immediately piqued my interest, though somehow the book ended up in Olman’s hands first.  While he was flipping through the pages, Craig was saying how he'd just found it on the street - someone was apparently moving and left a bunch of stuff on the sidewalk.  I remarked how the book was in such good condition and what a nice find.  Craig seemed very pleased. When I finally got to leaf through the book, I admired the slice-of-life photos of Plateau life circa the mid 1980s with St-Laurent Boulevard, aka The Main, as the anchor.  And how fitting that we're all situated in the Plateau!

I mentioned how I love black and white street photography, and how this book reminded me of Robert Frank’s work.  Why hadn’t I heard of this book before?  Craig asked if I’d ever seen a Diane Arbus exhibit, and I was hell, yes, back in 2003 when SFMOMA held a major retrospective of Arbus’ work.  I remember this well because that was when I first spent the Christmas holidays with my future parent-in-laws and was just getting to know them.  One morning after breakfast, we were in the kitchen discussing what we’d do that day, and it was brought up that we’d all go see the Diane Arbus Revelations show at SFMOMA.  I literally gasped out loud.  OMG!  I was a big admirer of Arbus' work, had never laid eyes on her original prints before, and there was a major retrospective of her work and my in-laws want to go see it?!  These are my people!

I also mentioned that the Musee des Beaux Arts had a Diane Arbus exhibit recently, but Craig kind of waved it off as it was so small.  He had seen her show in New York several years ago. Anyway, when I got home later that day, I looked up The Main, which seemed to have languished in obscurity and has been long out of print.  On AbeBooks, I found the same hardbound edition in great condition at a Westmount bookstore (that only had an online presence) for $30 USD with $10 shipping.  It arrived about a week later.  I now have my own copy of The Main, which is in slightly better condition than Greg’s.

The Main was a marvellous time capsule of my neighbourhood that doesn’t really exist anymore due to the inevitable societal shifts and gentrification.  The Plateau used to be known as a working-class neighbourhood of immigrants, namely Jewish, Portuguese, and Greek.  Rent was cheap, and due to its central location, the Plateau was also a haven for university students, artists and musicians.  It’s most famous residents were Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen. Even back when I first visited the Plateau in the 1990’s there was already some gentrification taking place.  It wasn’t until Ubisoft moved into the Peck Building and the sudden rise of local indie bands like Arcade Fire did the Plateau/Mile End become a “hot” neighbourhood.  

Over the years, many of the original residents have moved on, either to the suburbs or more affordable areas.  The rent and housing prices have driven many artists away.   But there are still traces and fragments here and there.  Portuguese rotisseries and restaurants still abound, and the bagel shops and Jewish establishments like Cheskie’s and Beauty’s remain steadfast institutions.  But it has lost a lot of its original working-class roots and artistic edginess, becoming a well-to-do area that attracts French nationals and affluent professionals.

A couple of summers ago, my daughter had a big yard sale, and these Portuguese ladies came by to chat with me, saying they used to live in our apartment years ago.  They now live in the West Island, but they love to come back to their old neighbourhood to shop (they had just come from le Patisserie Lawrence V.).  Sure, there are still older Jewish, Portuguese and Chinese residents here, but many, like these ladies, have moved to the suburbs over the years.

In any case, I recognized so many familiar locations via Hillel's photos.  This one with the woman sitting by the Virginia Woolf portrait is the alley where I live!  Where that chain link fence used to be is our parking area. 

There was one photo taken from the lobby interior of what was then known as the Peck Building, but the portico entrance looked familiar, and I thought how much it looked like the Ubisoft building.  The text mentioned that the building was located on the corner of St-Laurent Blvd and St-Viateur - so I was right!

 

There were many great street photos:  one with Charcuterie Hongroise (still going, but for how much  longer?) and Charcuterie Fairmount (RIP).

Berson & Sons Monuments, one of the oldest landmarks on The Main, was replaced by an ugly new condo building about a decade ago.

Author/artist Edward Hillel himself has evolved into a multi-disciplinary artist based in New York now.  While I was googling him, I realized I had missed out on a very cool 2017 exhibit at The Museum of Jewish Montreal right in the Plateau!  It included never-before-seen contact sheets - all the negatives that did and didn't make the cut for the The Main.

The St-Laurent merchants' association commissioned Hillel, now based in New York, to return to the Plateau and create a new series of colour photos documenting the boulevard, 30 years after The Main was published.  Apparently, Hillel was gratified to find some of his old haunts still intact.

Argh!!  If only I had known about this back then!  What a missed opportunity!  

7. My Career Goes Bung

By Miles Franklin

6. Apt Pupil

By Stephen King

5. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

By Ransom Riggs

4. Zombie

By Joyce Carol Oates

3. The Driver's Seat

By Muriel Spark

The 1974 film, Identikit, had been on my watch list for some time with this intriguing description: "Liz Taylor as suicidal spinster; hard to find." 

 

I was sure I'd first learned of the film via Kier-La Janisse's House of Psychotic Women, but couldn't find any reference to either 'Identikit' nor 'The Driver's Seat' in the index -- only Secret Ceremony was cited in reference to Elizabeth Taylor (apparently Severin's House of Psychotic Women collection, an unusual DVD box set based on the book, features Identikit).

 

Last October, I finally watched Identikit, about “a flamboyantly dressed Englishwoman cutting a swath through Italy - tourism as exhibitionism, self-destruction as self-actualization.”  I believe it was due to Janisse's efforts that Identikit has been made available on various streaming services, like Prime and Shudder (I streamed it on Tubi). Still not sure whether I actually liked this unsettling film, but I certainly appreciated it as an unusual oddity, with its garish 70's Italo-trash aesthetics and Liz Taylor’s unhinged performance. 

 

The premise of Identikit reminded me very much of Martin Amis' London Fields, which I’d read many years ago and was intrigued by its morbid subject matter, mostly because I was a teenager and I'd never read anything like it before. I realize now that Amis was likely influenced by The Driver's Seat when he wrote London Fields:  both Lise and Nicola Six are ‘murderees’ by their own design.  As a reader also observed: Amis tends to get excoriated for his creation of Six, as if she’s the creation of a misogynist. Yet is she really that different a creation from Lise?  

 

After having watched Identikit, I wanted to get my hands on Muriel Spark's novella.

 

While reading the book, much of the mystery surrounding Lise’s motives was gone having already watched the film adaptation, which was incredibly faithful to The Driver’s Seat.  However, the book did provide a tiny clue into her erratic and unconventional behaviour (that seemed to be missing in the film):

Her lips are slightly parted: she, whose lips are usually pressed together with the daily disapprovals of the accountants’ office where she has worked continually, except for the months of illness, since she was 18, that is to say, for 16 years and some months. Her lips, when she does not speak or eat, are normally pressed together like the ruled line of a balance sheet, marked straight with her old-fashioned lipstick, a final and judging mouth, a precision instrument.

Lise seemed to have undergone some kind of long-term health issue and her death-wish may be due to the fact that she had some form of terminal illness, which she hadn't divulged to anyone.

A Letterboxd reviewer for Identikit took the words out of my mouth:

I was struck by how incredibly faithful the film is to the source, even adhering closely to the clever way the book plays with time. Giuseppe Patroni Griffi's images support the text wonderfully right from the opening shots of nude mannequins with heads covered in shiny reflecting foil. There is a constant motif of bright backlighting as well, reflecting the harsh personality of Lise, forcing your eyes to adjust and create definition. All lovely ways of reinforcing a story that centers around the concept of identity, and how we form and control the way we are perceived.

Much like Identikit, I wasn't sure whether I liked The Driver's Seat, but I certainly appreciated its oddness, its unsettling-ness, its frankness, as well as its leanness, much like this reader: 

 I decided to reread a book that is one of her shortest, most memorable and certainly starkest…  The Driver’s Seat (1970) is 101 pages long (in the irksome style of technology manufacturers who describe their products as “7.2mm thin”, I suppose I should say it’s 101 pages short). That is important because first, it shows that Spark has no interest in padding out her story – it is not one of those novels that is really an abruptly promoted novella – and second, because it means the story has almost no middle. It’s lean and hungry. There are many books whose beginnings or endings are praised, but how often do we say, The middle of that book? I couldn’t get enough of it. When you see a book without a middle – Patrick McGrath’s Dr Haggard’s Disease also comes to mind – it’s likely that rather than having only a beginning and an end, what has really happened is that the author has followed Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to “start as close to the end as possible.”

The Driver's Seat,was very much a dark, existential journey (physical and psychological) of a woman who lived a conventional life who comes to realize she doesn't have much to lose, and is looking for a way to end her life in her own terms, yet is still limited in agency due to 20th c. (patriarchal) society.  It was even shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1970.  I would definitely read more Muriel Spark, if I come across her other books.

2. A Haunting On the Hill

By Elizabeth Hand

For Christmas, my BIL had given me The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, a Booker Prize shortlister I wasn’t familiar with. He said I was welcome to exchange it at Mrs Dalloway’s for something that was more in my wheelhouse.  I browsed for a long time before I spotted a single hardbound copy of A Haunting on the Hill.  I had no idea Elizabeth Hand had written an official sequel to Shirley Jackon’s most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House!  It was released only a few months ago in October 2023.

I was a big admirer of Hand’s horror mystery thriller Generation Loss, which first won her the 2008 Shirley Jackson award.  It seemed the planets were aligned for me to read A Haunting on the Hill: it was the exact same price as The Bee Sting, so the clerk was able to do a clean exchange for me. I was really looking forward to starting 2024 with a new release! 

The novel begins with Holly and her girlfriend Nisa taking a weekend break away from NYC.  Holly is a struggling playwright who got a lucky break with a $10,000 grant to produce The Witching Hour -- a passion project inspired by Elizabeth Sawyer, who was accused of witchcraft and executed in 17th c. New England.  Nisa, a singer-songwriter obsessed with murder ballads, will compose the music and perform the songs on stage with the actors.  

While out on a drive, Holly discovers Hill House.  She had been searching for a retreat, a place where her performers could rehearse, do read-throughs and collaborate on the development of the play.  She manages to find the local real estate agent, Ainsley, who happens to own Hill House.  Ainsley is reluctant at first, but agrees to rent Hill House to Holly for the week.

Holly brings on board Stevie, a sound designer who was a former child stage actor, and Amanda Greer, a lauded theatre actor who was involved in an unfortunate accident that somewhat rerailed her career.  At first I was a little wary, as the four main characters are self-involved theatre types. What kind of eye-rolling antics would I have to endure with a bunch of clashing egos thrown into a claustrophobic haunted house.  Holly has been frustrated by her stagnant career path and considers the grant her one chance at breaking out as a successful playwright, so she’s determined to make this work, no matter how her gut keeps screaming out there is something terribly wrong with Hill House

Holly’s gf Nisa is probably the most annoying character of the four.  Blessed with a beautiful voice, she’s constantly trying to “test the acoustics" by belting out her compositions.  And with an innate talent for penning melancholy folk songs, she has a promising musical career, yet deep-down she’s suspicious that Holly wants to reign her in.  She’s also narcissistic and having a secret affair with Stevie.

Stevie is one of Holly’s best friends.  As a former child stage actor, he was sexually abused by an older costar, and has grown up dealing wit his past trauma with drugs and hedonism.  Hill House first “reveals” itself to Stevie by giving him the illusion of a safe space in the form of a secret door that’s meant just for him.

Like Nisa, Amanda also likes to command attention, yet unlike Nisa, she is horribly insecure.  Her being older than the others doesn’t help either.  It’s important to note that all three women are desperate to either revive or kickstart their respective careers, and this desperation is what binds them to Hill House.

Overall, I found A Haunting on the Hill to be extremely disappointing, almost to the point of being badly written. First, I had no connection with any of the characters.  Yes, they were immature, unlikeable theatre people, but writers like Patricia Highsmith had a way of making unpleasant characters relatable, or at the very least, fascinating.  Hand herself had created one of the most deeply flawed characters in Cass Neary, yet I could still relate to Cass’ foibles.   The four main characters in A Haunting on the Hill were too self-obsessed to truly care for anyone.  Second, the story wasn't even remotely creepy, let alone scary.  The black menacing hares of unusual size did absolutely nothing for me.  What made Shirley Jackson’s novel so effective was, as the reader, you were never sure whether the house was truly haunted, or whether all the inexplicable occurrences were all in Eleanor’s mind.

The pacing was also off somehow.  There wasn’t any sense of impending doom that ever got properly built up.  The novel was written in the first person from Holly’s POV, yet equal time was spent inside the heads of Nisa, Stevie and Amanda. Holly didn’t have a particularly unique perspective, so I thought it was strange that Hand didn’t use the third person to narrate (which Jackson did for The Haunting of Hill House).    

   Now she grew angry.  They were supposed to all be in this together, with the same goal: the play.  Yet there was Stevie, upstaging her in the parlor, pulling out all the stops as that damned dog. Her voice and her songs were what knit the entire story together, even Holly had admitted that.

   And where was her reward?  Nisa had brought beauty and a sense of ancient mystery to Holly’s words.  She’d infused them with a power and terror that echoed down through centuries unitl Nisa held them, protected them, shared them with those she thought she could trust with something so precious. 

   But all they could see and hear were their own voices.  Petty. Selfish. Greedy.  Deaf to beauty when it rang out.

Hand went deeply into everyone’s past issues, and Hill House amplified their destructive neuroses and desires, yet everyone still felt so two-dimensional, and awful.  Holly, Nisa, Stevie, and Amanda were mostly bickering, bitchy theatre types.  The three women who watched over Hill House -- Ainsely, Melissa, and Evadne -- were even more thinly drawn.  They were supposed to be good witches yet their motives or histories were never developed.  Perhaps Hand wanted to keep them mysterious or inscrutable, but they did nothing to propel the narrative.  They didn't even provide any substantial backstory to Hill House.  There was also something about a family who had lived in Hill House during 80's and a teenaged son who had disappeared, but this is only briefly alluded to.  Ainsley had agreed to rent out Hill House too easily despite knowing the danger she’d be putting her renters in.  She also never reappeared again.  Only Melissa and Evadne made half-hearted attempts to convince the occupants to leave before the forecasted October snow storm.  When Melissa mentioned “it was too late”, she just took off! 

It would’ve made more sense if Ainsley had more of a connection with the house and was making excuses to rent it out, ie. nothing bad had happened there for a long time, and she needed the money, when in actual fact, the house wanted to be “fed” a la Burnt Offerings (which I still need to watch).  There could’ve been interpersonal conflicts between Ainsely, Melissa and Evadne (which would provide a nice counterpoint to Holly, Nisa and Amanda).  And Melissa and Evadne could’ve swooped in at the last minute to extricate Holly, Amanda and Stevie (because there had to be one sacrificial victim – it’s a horror thriller after all!).  But this never happened.

 Though Stevie himself had felt it, too, in the parlor, that primal thrill as he felt himself fold into someone else. Something else…

     He knew from Holly’s expression that his performance had already surpassed whatever she’d hoped for. He still felt it, a flash of the intense charge he got when he’d nailed a part a shivery current that ran through his entire body, everything seeming to tremble, on the verge of coming apart. The others had laughed when Amanda talked about actors being possessed, but he knew that she was right.

    It had been years since he’d felt it, like a drug he’d forsaken. Only this wasn’t bad for him, like drugs. This was what he’d needed, all along. This was what he’d been secretly praying for, the chance to give himself over to something more powerful than himself. The muse, an old acting teacher called it.

I really liked the idea of having a group of actors unknowingly channelling the latent power of Hill House during their rehearsals, much like the psychics in Jackson’s original story.  The characters were definitely seeing and hearing things that didn’t make sense.  But the sightings of the menacing big black hare didn’t make much narrative or symbolic sense - it just left me scratching my head.  And that secret door leading to a psychedelic passageway just seemed kind of silly.

Many ideas that had any potential ended up feeling half-baked.  I mentioned the pacing - it took far too long for things to happen.  Like Stevie finally opening that damned secret door near the end.   Then the storm came and the strange knocking.  Then Nisa snuck up to the door because she couldn’t stand the fact that Stevie would keep something like this from her, but like an idiot, ended up getting trapped inside the bowels of the house.  It was all kind of rushed.  Too much time was spent on four annoying characters and their bitchy interpersonal dynamics, their flaws and insecurities on repeat.  Not enough effort spent creating an effective or marginally scary horror story.  

In the end, it was Nisa who got “eaten” by Hill House, not Holly.  A year later, Holly was still able to produce her play with Amanda Greer as the star and using recordings of Nisa’s music.  But it wasn’t clear whether Holly had changed or even learned anything because none of the survivors really talked about what happened at Hill House. They just moved on with their lives.

I think an important detail that Hand missed was that it was never proven that Hill House was really haunted.  Anyone who had met their fate at the hands of Hill House was mentally unstable in some way.  Hill House always knew who the most vulnerable person was.  Nisa was too self-involved and full of herself to be an Eleanor Vance.  But as the most annoying character in the novel, I was nevertheless glad the house took her!

It's a shame really, as I really wanted to like this novel. Now I'm going to have to find a way to sell or giveaway this lovely hardcover!

1. Our Lady of Mile End

By Sarah Gilbert 

I'd first heard of Our Lady of Mile End via FB -- by seeing a friend flag that she was going to attend the book launch event at the D&Q bookstore.  I learned later she was actually good friends with author Sarah Gilbert, not to mention she'd also highly recommended that I read the book.  So when I was at D&Q to do some Christmas shopping, I decided to purchase a copy so as to support a local writer and fellow neighbour, even though I didn't know her personally.  I’ve lived in the Mile End for about 15 years while Gilbert has lived here since she was a university student in the 1990s. 

A bit of background about the author:

 

Gilbert started writing about Mile End while on maternity leave in 2008.  “I took a lot of walks with my daughter, and often I was pushing the stroller very slowly to get her to sleep,” she explains. “I got to observe my surroundings in detail.”

The immediate result was Mile Endings, a blog that recorded the people and places affected — for better or for worse — by the neighbourhood’s ongoing gentrification. It found an enthusiastic audience.

 

So it made sense for Gilbert to eventually segue into short stories about the neighbourhood she loves, and the collection became Our Lady of Mile End.  Already loving the cover illustration – Mile End residents "airing out their laundry" on multiple clothes lines strung between the neighbourhood's signature triplex buildings -- I was very much looking forward to reading the collection, assuming the stories would cover a various cross-section of intersecting lives of my fellow residents.

 

First up was “Material”, about a young artist, Alice, who cleans apartments in the Mile End for a living.  The story begins with Alice taking a shower at her client’s place.  Since she lives at her warehouse studio along with other artists, and it’s located in an industrial zone, the building isn’t fitted with kitchens and showers, and the Y was closed due to renovations.   In any case, Alice’s client comes home unexpectedly, surprised to see that Alice had used her shower.  Ok, so far an interesting situation that reflects the gentrification of the Mile End, which not that long ago, used to be very affordable for artists and musicians, but rising rents forced many move to cheaper areas.  Interestingly, Alice is a textile artist who likes to collect castoffs from her clients, namely the lint that collects in the dryer, to use in her artwork.  However, before anything of substance could take root in “Material”, the story was over after a few pages.  

 

The next story was “What If”, about a woman named Meg who left the back door ajar while WFH alone inside her apartment.  When she goes into the kitchen, she finds a strange man peering into her refrigerator.  He had splotches of blue pain all over his shirt and acted rather nonchalant about his appearance.   Since her bf was involved in theatre, for some bizarre reason, Meg assumed that Jason sent a friend over to perform some kind of prank on her, because why would a robber act like he’s just dropping by her place?  Later, after talking to her friend, Meg learned a bank heist had occurred in the area and one of the robbers fled the scene while the police went in search for him.  Meg realized that the man who was in her kitchen and used her bathroom was probably the bank robber!

 

This made me recall a fairly exciting news story some years ago about an armed bank robbery attempt which involved a police car chase, then the car crashed, a male suspect fled the scene and was still at large in the Mile End.  The police had cordoned off the entire area as they scoured the alleys and yards in search of the fugitive.  This happened back in 2016, but Gilbert re-situated the event six months before the pandemic, a time when no once visited people’s homes anymore.  “There was no possibility of strangers, no surprise encounters.”

 

Long after the blue paint-splotched man left her home without incident, and Meg realized she was put in a potentially dangerous situation, she got turned on as she recalled her chance encounter, hence the title “What If.”   This made me groan inside (not in a good way), and made me wonder whether Gilbert had this very same "what if" fantasy, ie. “what if a fugitive bank robber ended up hiding in my apartment?”  I didn't want to read about the author's sex fantasy, FFS!  Gimme some stories about people's real lives!!

 

By this point, I was getting a little wary.  I don’t read short stories often, but I know they can be wispy vignettes and fleeting sketches of life, yet taken together as a whole, they could form an over-arching idea, held together by common themes, etc.  This was kind of what I was hoping for in Our Lady of Mile End.  But after reading a story, it would leave me feeling unsatisfied, like consuming bland consommé for lunch instead of something more filling.  

 

There was one recurring character who appeared in several stories. Evelyn the English college professor first appeared in an early story “Introduction to College English” in which she gets into a conflict with a student named Maya.  The story delves into each person’s POV of the other, and ends up with Evelyn writing a nice reference letter for Maya.  

 

In “The Visit”, Evelyn is at her Mile End apartment when she gets a phone call from her brother Dominiq who had just arrived at the airport for a spontaneous visit.  She convinces him to meet her at her chalet in the Laurentians, so most of the story is about her and her brother having fairly mundane conversations about their lives.  At the end of the story, we find out that this visit as fabricated and all in Evelyn’s head as her brother never made it out to see her.  In reality, he had been diagnosed with late stage cancer and died a few weeks later.  Not only was the story barely had anything to do with the Mile End, it was a wish fulfillment fantasy.  The story ended with a “—for Bart” so it seemed to have personal relevance for Gilbert, at least.  And Evelyn Wilson seems to be a kind of cipher for the author as they are both English professors who live in the Mile End?

 

Another lacklustre story was “Green Eyes”, about a young woman named Amber somewhere four hours north of Montreal trying to hack tree-planting.  I couldn’t remember if her character had appeared in an earlier story, but this was yet another story that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the Mile End except for one paragraph:

     The Park Avenue grocery store where she’d worked for two university summers would be busy by now, with lines of shoppers snaking up to her cash… There had to be more to work than being a human robot. 

     She got the tree planting idea from a friend of a friend who was selling his bags and shovel.

Why couldn't the story be about her experience working at the checkout line instead? Personally, I wasn’t all that interested in reading about Amber tree-planting in some remote area of Quebec, even if she happened to work at the PA Supermarket.  I felt cheated somehow!

 

“Catch” was the final story in the collection based on a rather sensational incident of an attempted kidnapping of a teenage girl in adjacent Outremont.  Again, I remembered the news coverage of the incident and fortunately, the girl was able to escape unscathed.  Gilbert’s story used all the major facts from the incident:

“The girl, who is a minor and whose name is protected by a publication ban, was walking to her friend’s house Friday afternoon when a motorist pulled up beside her at St-Viateur and Durocher Sts.

The man identified himself as a police officer and said he had to arrest her because she was a suspect in a drug deal. She was handcuffed, placed in the back of the car and blindfolded, she told the police.

After screaming for several minutes while the man was driving, she managed to open the door and fall out onto the street.

A witness took a photo of the suspect’s licence plate as he sped off. Police arrested the suspect about an hour later on Montreal’s north shore…”

 

In Gilbert’s story, there were also a few witnesses, with the focus on a busybody woman named Irene, who kind of took charge of the situation.  She spoke to the police and seeing that the girl was in shock, and recognizing a nun who was living at the nearby Carmelite convent, she got an idea.  Irene approached the nun and asked if the convent would be willing to harbor the traumatised teenager until a family member arrived.  I think this is where Our Lady of Mile End gets its title from.

 

It’s clear that Gilbert drew some of her inspiration from local news articles over the years and tried to weave them into her stories.  The author didn’t seem to have any real connection to the kidnapped girl.  Nor did she seem to know anyone who may have had a run-in with the “sexy” bank robber.  I was left disappointed that Gilbert didn’t draw inspiration from actual locals, who either lived or worked in the Mile End.  What were their stories, I wondered?  I’m sure former bookseller SW Welch had many interesting stories about his colourful customers.  Pretty much all the characters Gilbert’s stories were white, Anglo, with similar socio-economic backgrounds.  Gilbert definitely followed the adage of writing what she knows.  With what she didn’t know, she got from news stories of bank heists and attempted kidnappings.  So rather than stories about actual insiders, it felt more like they were written by someone looking from the outside in, which is not so different from her early blog observations.

 

A good example is the third last story, “The Word”, which once again features Gilbert’s alter ego, Evelyn Wilson (Gilbert taught literature at Dawson College).  This time, Evelyn is trying to conduct a post-pandemic zoom class with her students.  She decided to read aloud a poem that had the n-word in it, thus promptly losing control of her class as it deteriorates into arguments about whether saying the n-word is racist or not.  Part of the story is also told from the POV of the student as the n-word was overheard by his younger brother and his mom, as they live in a small apartment.  The student and his family aren’t white, but their racial background isn’t specified.  This was the only story that featured people who weren’t white.

 

The student observes Evelyn as she vainly tries to defend herself:  “I read the words in the poem so we could examine the context in which Shire uses the n-word and see her specific purpose for doing so.  To clarify, I was not, I am not, using the n-word myself.”

 

In any case, the class was a failure, and a few days later, Evelyn runs into this student, who was visiting the area with a friend (he doesn’t live in ‘affluent’ Mile End).   The story makes it clear that Evelyn, despite being gray and frumpy, lives a privileged life (we should note that she also has a chalet in the Laurentians, as noted in “The Visit”.) and strongly hints that Evelyn has some thinking to do.  

Gilbert once again, probably got the idea for “The Word” as the use of the n-word in academic settings has been a hot button issue in recent years about whether freedom of expression can trump the freedom of being othered felt by various minority groups.  There have been media coverage of teacher and professors in Quebec and Ottawa being cancelled because they dared utter the n-word in front of students.

 

Again, like many of the stories, the theme was only lightly dealt with as the stories are limited in length.  I very much wanted to like OLoME, and at first it really looked like something I could relate to.  But most of the stories were unsatisfying or rather meh.  The Montreal Guardian described the collection as “warm-hearted and well-meant” which to me, is code for “safe literature”.  If I was a writer, I'd hate it if a critic described my fiction as "well-meant"!  I don’t mind if the stories are about ordinary people, like myself, but the content of the stories felt limited in scope and somewhat solipsistic in that it didn’t capture a diverse cross-section of the Mile End.  In hindsight, I should’ve just borrowed the book from the library instead of spending $20 on it!