This is one strange little book. Most of the stuff is sort of surreal, with people sitting in other people’s eyeballs and hot air balloons attached to people’s shoes. We get sentences like, “Better late than living on goat’s cheese in an abandoned train car somewhere deep in the forest,” and “Husbands are perpetually full of rotating granite eggs and the breath of a curious dog.” There are three blank pages (except for page numbers) smack in the middle of the book. The longest story here is about a guy who wakes up in his bed late one night and finds himself on trial. There’s a judge, a prosecutor, a defendant and a jury, all in his bedroom. The only thing missing is a defense lawyer. “Your lawyer was here an hour ago,” the prosecutor (says). “But seeing that you were asleep, he refused to wait and left.” In the final story, the narrator meets a floating turnip and takes it home in a bowler cap. Right in the middle of all this insubstantial fluff, is a wonderful, disarmingly unironic one-page account of the death and burial of a child’s pet hampster complete with fancy-toffee-tin coffin.
chap-book / 27 pages / Publisher: Kadath Press / Main Creator: Cameron A Straughan / $2 + 2 stamps, or trade / 3127 St. Catherines St., Vancouver, BC, V5T 3Z3