What you need to understand before you enter the world of zines is that stories are a dime a dozen. Everybody has a story. Granted, there are people who have a knack for making up stories, stories with strange twists, “what if” stories. Like, what if the adult education French teacher in a small town in Manitoba actually knew very little French, but no one else in town knew any French at all, so everybody went on learning incorrect French? Or, what if a man spent 25 years translating Shakespeare into African click language and then realized at the end of the venture that, “maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all?” Scott Montgomery serves up a bunch of “what if” stories in Bold Adventures on the Open Sea. As you read them, you will come to realize that it isn’t enough to have a story, or even a knack for making up a twist. Like pop tunes with their little, inconsequential hooks, there’s a kind of buoyancy to these stories that comes from their complete lack of substance. Here’s an example of the kind of thing you get from Montgomery: “A sly afterthought: In some places autumn is called the fall and, in many of those same places, the memory of a man who ate an apple is also called The Fall.” The book is loaded with silly crap about dragons and talking squirrels and rabbits colonizing Mars. Here’s my best-case scenario: Scott Montgomery is 14 years old, his favourite writer is Robert Heinlein, and when he grows up he wants to be a writer. (KS)
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