Showing posts with label Grainger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grainger. Show all posts

29 January 2020

Published in the Age of Unravelling



Can it be? Not four weeks into the New Year and already a new Canadian Notes & Queries? A theme issue – "Writing in the Age of Unravelling" – it makes for some uncomfortable reading. Catherine Bush contributes an essay on representations of the climate crisis in fiction. Jacky Sawatzky writes on her memorial to the endangered giraffe. Jennifer Ilse Black and Waubgeshig Rice are interviewed. Andrew Forbes presents a cli-fi primer.


Credit goes to Guest Editors Patricia Robertson and Sharon English.

The issue's Dusty Bookcase concerns Hotter Than Hell, the 1974 Kiss album produced by Kenny Kenner and Richie Wise.

I jest. It's about the 2005 dystopian novel of the same title.


Political animals will remember Hotter Than Hell as the small press book the newly-elected Harper Conservatives made famous by silencing its author, government scientist Mark Tushington.

What intrigued me is that for all the coverage – The Globe & MailThe New York Times, The Scientist, et al – no one appeared to have taken the time to read the damn thing.

Well, I've read it. And now you don't have to.

Here's a typical passage:
The Eighteenth Guard (Pennsylvania) and Eighth Guard (New York) divisions, supported by the 1st Marine and 57th Urban brigades were attacking, The First Guard Division was being badly defeated in every sector. The 28th and 29th regiments were quickly pushed out of Abany and up the length of the Mohawk Valley. It was only then that we retreated into Utica that my forces could hold. Because of the inactivity of the IV Corps, I took a supreme gamble and withdrew elements of the 6th Armored Brigade from covering Montreal.
You're welcome.

Other contributors include:
Madhur Anand
Peter Anson
Nicholas Bradley
Yuan Changming
Stephen Fowler
Lise Gaston
Roger Greenwald
Mahak Jain
Joanna Lilley
JF Martel
David Mason
Catherine Owen
Seth
Roz Spafford
Erika Thorkelson
RM Vaughan
Mary Lou Zeitown
The issue also features the annual Book Review supplement.


Thirty-two pages of goodness, provided by:
Michel Basilières
Steven W. Beattie
Jeff Bursey
Andreae Callahan
Laura Cameron
Paige Cooper
Trevor Corkum
André Forget
Monique Giroux
James Granger
Brett Josef Grubisic
Katia Grubisic
Stephen Henighan
Dancy Mason
Rohan Maitzen
Rod Moody-Corbet
Rudrapriya Rathore
Patricia Robertson
Matthew D. Rodrigues
Mark Sampson
Jonathan Valelly
Derek Webster
Bruce Whiteman
Apparently, there's a sequel to Hotter Than Hell.

I'll leave it to others to explore.

Related post:

01 August 2018

Mrs Lowry's West Coast Murder Mystery



"Malcolm Lowry has an entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia, so why not wife Margerie?" This is the question I pose in reviewing Margerie Bonner's 1946 novel The Shapes That Creep for the new Summer edition of Canadian Notes & Queries. As I point out, Bonner lived in Canada just as long as her husband, and published three novels during the couple's Canadian years. The Shapes That Creep, the first, is set in motion by the discovery of a murdered recluse in a community modelled on Deep Cove, British Columbia.


My review of The Shapes That Creep – with argument for Bonner's inclusion in the Encyclopedia – is the subject of my Dusty Bookcase column. Over at the What's Old feature, I recommend reissues of two Canadian classics, Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes and The Black Donnellys by Thomas P. Kelley; along with Jimmie Dale, Alias the Gray Seal, a new Gray Seal adventure written by fan Michael Howard.


This being the Genre Issue, Deborah Dundas writes on her relationship with romance novels, Rui Umezawa looks at Enter the Dragon, and Robert J. Wiersema considers Stephen King's It as a work of empathy. Gemma Files, Sandra Kasturi, David Nickle, Andrew Pyper, and Robert Rowe dare revisit their first monsters.


Seth provides a cover that can double as a Halloween mask.

All is overseen by guest editor James Grainger, who also contributes an excellent piece on the disturbing 1972 horror/comedy Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things. Other contributors include:
Myra Bloom
Daniel Donaldson
Justin Donnait
André Forget
Chris Gilmore
Alex Good
Camila Grudova
Sandra Kasturiit
Sibyl Lamb
Annick MacAskill
David Mason
Patricia Robertson
Keven Spenst
Jay Stephens
JC Sutcliffe
Drew Hayden Taylor
and
Bruce Whiteman

As always, things wrap up with Stephen Fowler. This issue he exhumes the Civil Defence Health Service's Casualty Simulation (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, 1955).

The horror! The horror!

Related post:

17 April 2015

Remembering Ron Scheer… on a Friday



Ron Scheer died this past weekend. He was my teacher. We never met.

A son of Nebraska, for more than four years Ron served as a patient guide through the frontier literature of a century past. His blog, Buddies in the Saddle, opened the eyes of this cynical easterner so that I might recognize that these weren't simple novels of cowboys and Indians, but of commerce, railroads, mining, farming, timber, politics, suffrage, temperance, religion and racism.


Early last year Ron was diagnosed with brain cancer. Buddlies in the Saddle took a turn toward the personal. Ron's posts on books were now punctuated by musing on life, health, beauty, family. Family was the subject of his final post.

Ron posted his last book review seven weeks ago. His subject was Blue Pete: "Half-Breed", a popular 1921 novel by Ontarian Luke Allan (né William Lacey Amy).  The Canadian Encyclopedia has no entry on Allan, nor does The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, nor does W.H. New's Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada; everything I know about the writer and his work comes from Ron.

In the four years and nine months of Buddies in the Saddle, Ron tagged thirty book reviews with the word "Canada". Most were written by Canadians, while others had a Canadian setting. Some covered contemporary writing, but most came from the days of great and great-great-grandparents:

The Outlander – Gil Adamson
Blue Pete: "Half-Breed" – Luke Allan
The Blue Wolf – William Lacey Amy
Alton of Somasco – Harold Bindloss
The Boss of Wind River – A.M. Chisolm
Desert Conquest – A.M. Chisolm
The Doctor – Ralph Connor
The Story of the Foss River Ranch – Ridgwell Cullum
Woodsmen of the West – Martin Allerdale Grainger
A Man of Two Countries – Alice Harriman
The Promise – James B. Hendryx
Out of Drowning Valley – Susan Carleton Jones
The Stone Angel – Margaret Laurence
A Daughter of the Snows – Jack London
Scarlett of the Mounted – Marguerite Merington
The Lost Cabin Mine – Frederick Niven
Northern Lights – Gilbert Parker
The Backwoodsmen – Charles G.D. Roberts
Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse – Paul St. Pierre
Smith and Other Events – Paul St. Pierre
The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses – Robert W. Service
The Trail of '98 – Robert W. Service
Raw Gold – Bertrand W. Sinclair
Big Timber – Bertrand W. Sinclair
Wild West – Bertrand W. Sinclair
The Prairie Wife – Arthur Stringer
The Last Crossing - Guy Vanderhaeghe
A Good Man – Guy Vanderhaeghe
Frontier Stories – Cy Warman
The Settler – Herman Whitaker

So many neglected titles. Small wonder that Ron was a regular at Friday's Forgotten Books, that weekly round-up hosted by mystery writer Patti Abbott. His was a unique voice. Friday's Forgotten Books will not be the same without him.


"I read old books so you don’t have to," Ron wrote more than once. The thing was that he made you want to read them. His enthusiasm was infectious. He was a dogged researcher; I suspect he often had a hard time moving on. Ron's thoughts on Raw Gold by British Columbian Bertrand W. Sinclair spanned two posts. His longest review, it begins:
I have this funny habit when I hold an old library book. I wonder how long it’s been sitting on the shelf in the stacks untouched, then of the different hands that have turned its pages over the years.
I share the very same habit. Now, picking up Ralph Connor's The Doctor, I can't help but think of Ron.

Ron read this novel. 

RIP


19 September 2014

Here's to Patti Abbott and Friday's Forgotten Books



It's been well over six years since Patti Abbott launched Friday's Forgotten Books, a weekly round-up of blog posts dealing with buried, obliterated and blown over titles from years past. A latecomer, I first contributed back in December 2011 with Touchable, a novel co-authored by the man who created Bizarro World.


Anyone interested in the obscure will find Friday's Forgotten Books a weekly treat. Last Friday's gathering included neglected gems like Dolores Hitchins' Sleep with Slander and The Deadly Climate by Ursula Curtiss.

Most of Patti's contributors are Americans, and much of the focus is on the American and British, but that doesn't mean there's nothing for the lover of Canadian literature.

It was through Friday's Forgotten Books that I first read Ron Scheer, whose Buddies in the Saddle has served as my introduction to Canada's early frontier fiction. What follows is just a sampling of the Canadian books he has covered through the years:

The Blue Wolf – William Lacey Amy
The Boss of Wind River – A.M. Chisolm
Desert Conquest – A.M. Chisolm
The Doctor – Ralph Connor
Woodsman of the West – M. A. Grainger
Out of Drowning Valley – Susan C. Jones
The Lost Cabin Mine – Frederick Niven
Northern Lights – Glbert Parker
The Backwoodsmen – Charles G.D. Roberts
Smith and Other Events – Paul St Pierre
Raw Gold –Bertrand W. Sinclair
Big Timber – Bertrand W. Sinclair
Wild West– Bertrand W. Sinclair
The Prairie Wife  – Arthur Stringer
The Settler – Herman Whitaker

Patti herself is a great champion of Margaret Millar, as am I, as is John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books. Though we've never met in person, I think John might agree with me that Martin Brett's Hot Freeze is the great Canadian noir novel. At the very least, he shares my opinion regarding Frank L. Packard's influence in crime fiction. I would be doing something of a disservice in not sharing this image from John's post on Canadian Fandom #17. It may well be the ugliest thing published in 1951, and here I'm including Taylor Caldwell's The Balance Wheel.


Returning to Patti, this week saw the announcement of her debut novel, Concrete Angel. Publisher Polis Books describes it as an "unflinching novel about love, lust and greed". Who can resist? Not me. I'll be picking up a copy.