Book Review

Review: Queer Little Nightmares

Queer Little Nightmares accomplishes what mainstream media has historically feared: placing queerness at the forefront to tell human stories of creatures that seek love, vengeance, autonomy, and the reclamation of their ugliest parts.

Review: A Kid Called Chatter

Westerns are populated with larger-than-life characters, but children are notoriously difficult to write convincingly. Kelly’s Chatter and his orphan companions are adult minds in small bodies, making grave enigmatic statements while stone-facedly witnessing the world’s cruelty.

Review: The Second Substance

While it’s poetic enough and creates a lush mood of grimy eroticism, leveraging Lardeux’s talent for capturing sensory detail, The Second Substance’s experimentalism wrestles with the musk of the overly familiar.

Review: The Employees

In space, no one can hear you complain to HR. Olga Ravn’s The Employees is a sci-fi parable about what happens when you can never leave the office.

Review: No Shelter

Henry Doyle’s No Shelter is a plainspoken and authentic record of the grinding and unacknowledged quotidian battle with day labour, despair and displacement.

Review: Weeding

Geneviève Lebleu explores tense interpersonal relationships between several middle-aged women in a suburban neighborhood through the psychedelic imagery that so defines her lush illustration style.

Review: Remnants

Céline Huyghebaert’s latest work, translated by Aleshia Jensen, explores the gap left by the death of her father. A melange of form informs the process of understanding the author and her father.

Review: The Closer

You don’t have to be inside baseball to appreciate Jason Smith’s The Closer, a noir potboiler knocking dingers into the highly detailed background.

Review: Shelterbelts

Shelterbelts is an understated but forceful debut — a modern prairie drama with its own distinct visual language and memorable cast of characters, an impressive work that leaves one wanting more in the best way possible.

Review: Tear

Tear creates a superimposition of architectural and mental space characteristic of psychoanalysis, where physical spaces become symbolic of psychological states. A deeply gothic novel somewhere between Henry James and Shirley Jackson.

Review: Para-Social Butterfly

Designed and executed like a VTuber’s fever dream, Para-Social Butterfly adapts well-worn avant-garde and modernist poetics to stranger-than-fiction internet subcultures to present a surprisingly sympathetic critique of life under the ubiquitous influence of celebrity.