Are things going to get worse before they get better? It’s among the questions In Crisis, On Crisis ponders. We have a decaying social safety net, or maybe the rising cost of living has forced more people out on the streets, or maybe both. And then there are the looming environmental concerns and international conflicts. Cairns observes “history is full of situations that couldn’t be much ‘worse’ when collective action was rare or non-existent for decades … The terror of the Nazi regime didn’t trigger a mass coordinated fight back among Jews in Europe. The transatlantic slave system held for more than three hundred years.” In short, it’s entirely situational. Clearly some situations just don’t allow for organized resistance, and yet: “If one goal of radicals is to learn from history to inform our efforts to change the world, then let’s be honest that sometimes worse leads to better.”
An essay on crisis moves – getting out of the city because of the pandemic, as one example – also asserts reality is muddled: “When we consider the nested nature of crises – a personal move within a cost-of-living crisis within a pandemic within a global economic crisis – it becomes very difficult to distinguish causes from effects.”
I found the generally balanced approach in these essays oddly reassuring, if only because of the reminder there’s no rush to choose from the ongoing assortment of finger-pointing and sweeping generalizations to be found on social media, and possibly regular news if it becomes flooded with AI journalism. The book gives the reader the evidence you need to be forgiving of your own errors and bafflement, even as you broaden your acceptance that everything takes time. I don’t think the suggestion is that we routinely back away from taking action, just that it’s worth remembering the answers may be more complex than we assumed.
Democracy has been in crisis before, and ongoing discussions of this may, to some extent, be “code for mass disaffection,” suggests Cairns, including income inequality. There’s also “radical potential for change,” in assuming Liberal democracy is broken, but Cairns argues we’ve been down this road before without democracy vanishing: “Major crises nearly toppled liberal democracy on a global scale in 1918, 1933, 1947, 1962, 1974, 1989 and 2008. Then, as now, public intellectuals warned of democracy’s imminent end. In the past, governments made structural adjustments in time to avoid irreversible disaster.” Cairns sees “no alternative political-economic system or movement (from left or right) with the social weight necessary to topple liberal democracy and assume control after the fall.”
But for years we’ve already had the brand of so-called journalism that encourages resentment, and now we face AI journalism and possibly a serious, further erosion of trust because seeing is no longer believing. Cairns reminds us change is not always progress. And yet he points out that AI is a tool we could collectively use to test the truthfulness of statements.
I really have no criticisms for the book, and I think every reader will find something fascinating here. I’m not even including in this review all the quotes I troubled to write down. It’s safe to say I wasn’t in complete agreement with a couple of bold statements, but no one should read a collection of essays just to have all their own opinions reaffirmed. The brief essay Cairns produces on his affection for his infant son isn’t one of the more thought-provoking ones, but I’ll take any antidote to the toxic idea men always need to project strength. Finally, the details of his personal struggles enhance the essays because it helps the book feel grounded in the real world. If you crave a book that addresses larger ideas in thoughtful and nuanced writing, this is a worthy one.
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In 2016, Ray Robertson published Lives of the Poets (With Guitars), essays on the lives of different musicians, reviewed on Goodreads as “essays every bit as rollicking and energetic as many of the performers discussed.” There’s now a follow-up book called Dust: More Lives of the Poets (With Guitars) and I asked Ray if anything surprised him in researching the book, particularly if there was an overlooked musician. Ray provided the following excerpt about Danny Kirwan. The title of the book — Dust — is taken from his last song, recorded with Fleetwood Mac.
The legend of Fleetwood Mac goes something like this: in the beginning, there was Peter Green, Gibson Les Paul for hire in John Mayall’s mid-60’s Bluesbreakers, a brilliant but psychologically troubled musician who put the Mac together in 1967 (unassumingly naming it after his crack rhythm section of drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie) and played some staggeringly good guitar and wrote a bunch of great tunes before having his guitar god wings clipped by drugs and mental illness. Then, the story goes, the rudderless good ship Mac floundered on the seas of artistic and commercial irrelevancy for a few years in the early seventies before the pop gold renaissance that came when Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined the group at the decade’s midway point.
A legend, H.L. Mencken wrote, is a lie that has attained the dignity of age. Fleetwood Mac’s dark ages (1970-1974) are the lie that has become rock and roll legend, and principally because of the guitar playing, song writing, and singing talents of Danny Kirwan, who joined the group in the summer of 1968 as an alarmingly fresh-faced eighteen year old prodigy and was booted from the band four years later for drunken volatility—and by the age of thirty was out of the music business for good and on his way to full-blown alcoholism, debilitating mental illness, and eventual homelessness.
For a former member of a world-famous rock and roll band, Danny Kirwan is remarkably unknown, both in terms of the biographical details of his life and the wonderful music he created. He’s not a legend—he’s a mystery. Although he’s still waiting for the biography he deserves (I nominate Martin Celmins, Peter Green’s biographer and all round British blues authority), the music, as always, is there for us to listen to. The wife of Duster Bennett, the one-man British blues band, told Celmin, who wrote Duster Bennett’s biography, “Everything you want to know about Duster is all there in his music.” Maybe not everything—we still need that Danny Kirwan biography or documentary—but musicians do communicate most meaningfully through their music. That’s why they’re musicians. And whatever else Danny Kirwan was—alcoholic, mentally unstable, homeless and impoverished—he was foremost a musician. Danny Kirwan might be Fleetwood Mac’s mystery man, but it’s a mystery with a soundtrack that deserves to be heard.
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There’s a reason I’ve revisited Citizen Kane (including the commentary by Peter Bogdanovitch), listened to the 1966 recording of “River Deep, Mountain High,” and enjoyed a cartoon mashup of Godzilla and The Great Gatsby (Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre, Tom Scioli). Jason Guriel’s Fan Mail: A Guide to What We Love, Loathe and Mourn finds ways to be openly but profoundly articulate about poetry, even as it delightfully blends this fascination with so many others. Guriel recommends whatever he finds worthy, and as someone who explores reading, music and film at a slow and steady pace, it’s an ideal book.
The book is broken up into a section for each (“Love,” “Loathe” and “Mourn”), but Guriel explores in an open-minded way, finding “blindingly good” moments in The Virgin Suicides, nestled in the section for not-so loved.
A big part of writing is making language sit up and dance, and a big part of reviewing a book is having an eye for the perfect quote. Guriel is quite capable of all of the above. In his piece on “selfie criticism,” he observes those pieces by critics like Pauline Kael and Lester Bang that seem “fired by irrefutable furnaces: living, breathing personalities.” He notes a character in a film has “a scarf so threadbare it could be a gnawed-off noose.” Guriel quotes Carl Wilson describing Vegas as somewhere that leaves him “feeling insignificant and micro-penised.” I can picture Guriel underlining sentences or otherwise making note of a line, and isn’t that the kind of reader every writer wants?
The book is largely literary. Around twenty years ago now I hosted a reading series and Elise Partridge dropped in alone to do a reading from out of town. I went out of my way to chat with her, something she observed was kind, but it was really just a pleasure to meet someone so thoughtful. She died far too young, and a poignant piece by Guriel reminds me to read more of her poetry, even as there’s a casual reference to a final book of poems by John Updike, Endpoint.
On criticism, we get the observation, “because he tends to be exacting, the reader tends to trust his praise.” Wise words, considering I’ve gone on YouTube to hear book comments like “prepare to have chilly feet, because this book will knock your socks off.” Guriel mentions those “practicing artists who can’t help but comment on their art,” and I’m grateful he’s another one.
The commonly repeated call to read widely can mean a “failure to make judgments,” and it’s better to “fall down a rabbit hole,” a sentiment that reminded me Wayson Choy once told me to start reading like a writer, meaning simply pay attention to the way others do it. Does reading widely absolutely always mean you fail to be critical? Of course not, but it’s worth examining our instincts and habits when it comes to improvement, and improvement is supposed to matter.
On book blurbs, I share his view so many of us are “stunning,” these words become meaningless. Guriel provides some insightful examples of the subtle difference between a quietly potent blurb and the ones that somehow trip over themselves, even in a few sentences. But that’s what language can do all too easily. I’m not sure I agree “If your name needs a qualifier, you’re not ready to write blurbs for people.” Surely not many of us can get a blurb from someone like Stephen King, and when drawing from the ocean of largely unknown writers for a blurb, it only makes sense to note the person’s qualifications. Maybe the best answer is simply to dispense with blurbs as they’re so obviously rounded up. There are also astute comments on “the politics of bios,” in another essay, considering the suggestions they hold if the reader bothers to read between the lines.
Regardless, here’s my blurb for this latest book by Jason Guriel: “Reading Fan Mail feels like a series of lucky breaks, like every time you head down to the pub the same articulate, interesting person has something new to tell you about.”
A bit short? I’ll work on it.
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Lowfield by Mark Sampson
I have to admit, I didn’t have reading a horror novel set in PEI on my list of things to do for 2025, but I enjoyed Lowfield by Mark Sampson. Riley Fuller is a traumatized officer on leave when he inherits and explores his family’s ancestral property, an old house known as Applegarth. But does Fuller own the house, or does the house own him? With some of the shows I stream leaving a trail of undeveloped ideas, a novel set largely in one location appealed.
Sampson is a skilled writer. There’s enough detail here for the lives of the characters to feel convincing and real, but not so much it’s overbearing or tedious. The story is set around 1995, and Fuller cranks up his computer and begins a journal, “Dear Diary, or Journal, or whatever the fuck you are.” He’s exploring the whole e-mail thing, which everyone seems to be getting. It’s a novel that reminded me of John Wyndham because Wyndham is also capable of grounding his characters in a believable world as a way to help him sell and explore extraordinary ideas.
Sampson grew up on PEI and I can only assume that helps him add convincing detail. When an old journal in the house refers to “P. E. Island,” it feels very real. Characters say imperfect things and act imperfectly, but the book is also served well by its description. In a nightmare about jellyfish they’re “an army of glutinous, wine-dark blobs undulating in the salty waves, trailing their stinging tendrils behind them like torn skirts.”
I was surprised at some of the lines the book crosses, but it’s in the name of showing the corrupting, appalling influence of the house as it seizes Fuller with its own goals. It’s in the name of giving the book a potency it wouldn’t otherwise have, and the suggestion toxic masculinity is both exhausting and suffocating is not, wisely, spelled out for the reader. The house can repair itself even as corrupting visions about using others grip Fuller. Fair warning, the book finds its way to grotesque moments, and while that isn’t normally my cup of tea because I don’t have a strong stomach, in the hands of a skilled writer it has a purpose. I think there should be room in literary culture for horror and SF that examines large, universal ideas. All this is blended with some suggestions about the history of the province and the value of journalism.
There’s even a dash of literary criticism here when Fuller is sent an “impenetrable,” and “baffling” book of Canadian poetry. It contributes to Riley concluding “I hate reading,” but while I was tempted to suggest this was a heavy-handed moment — it does take the reader out of the story to some extent — I wondered if there’s meant to be an implied connection between Lowfield (a location eventually detailed in the book) and lowbrow, so that overall, the novel is perhaps suggesting some of the fault is in Fuller for not wanting to meet a book of poetry halfway.
I think there’s an argument to be made that in terms of theme, subtlety can be trusted to have more impact on the reader, in the end. The way these themes and ideas are not spelled out at a time direct statements are becoming more common is part of the value of Lowfield, which I’m very glad to have read.
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Dear Ray
Recently, I enjoyed Dear Ray by Donna Dunlop, a long poem about Raymond Souster and his loss. Souster is a deserving poet and — though I never met him — someone I believe to be a deserving soul for a book like this one, and the poem finds many poignant moments in the long wait and decline that comes with illness. The title really says it all in that this is a concise, loving tribute.
The book is available from Contact Press.
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Court of Memory, James McConkey
Sadly out of print for years — and I’m sorry to say it sat on my shelf for so long before I finished it, I no longer remember where I bought it — I found much to admire in this set of essays. McConkey has that rare quality: reverence. But what he does repeatedly through the book is humanize people, even immensely unlikeable ones. Here’s a passage from his World War Two experience on a mail orderly:
“He had no friends and apparently desired none. The platoon thought him a sadist. Both in training camp and abroad he would postpone as long as possible the distribution of mail. Finally he would climb upon a table or file case and cry imperiously for silence. He dispensed the letters with a flourish, as if each were a token of his personal largess. If a soldier became angry at his tyrannical slowness, he was apt to leave his perch for an hour or so, taking all the mail with him; and he was known to have withheld letters for several days from any person who displeased him. His platoon wished to murder him; he was beaten up on at least one occasion. In eastern France he appeared late one night during a snowstorm at divisional headquarters, to which I had been transferred, to pick up some packages – a task anybody else would have delayed until the following morning. We saw him suddenly fall to the ground, threshing in helpless convulsions, his little packages skittering over the snow. A medic wedged open his mouth to keep him from biting off his tongue. The mail orderly had managed to conceal until that moment the fact that he was an epileptic. Afterwards, in tears, he begged that he be permitted to remain overseas with his buddies, to whom he thought himself of use; but he was immediately shipped home. I never heard of him again.”
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Tags: history, writing
I’ve reviewed Quicker Than the Eye by Joe Fiorito, and included mentions of several other poets I admire and appreciate. The review is over at The Wood Lot, and my thanks to another talented poet, Chris Banks, for creating a home for poetry reviews and essays.
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Year in Review: 2024
Story collections: Coexistence (Billy-Ray Belcourt) is the kind of collection I appreciate because it’s intensely interested in being meaningful and profound, with lines like “Remember: a man is a fable that doesn’t necessarily convey a moral.”
What We Think We Know (Aaron Schneider) is a skillfully written set of stories with the right amount of experimentation: it’s the spice, not the main course. Reviewed below.
Difficult People (Catriona Wright) has one of those titles so good you wonder why you haven’t seen it before. Characters that feel quite real are in unique slices of life, so to speak.
Survivors of the Hive (Jason Heroux) is reviewed below as a story collection with a thoroughly enjoyable sense of experimentation. I imagine Heroux grew up on The Twilight Zone, like I did.
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (Raymond Carver) has a bit of a fragmented approach, but I appreciate that Carver wants to capture something real rather than provide all the answers.
Novels: Black Dogs (Ian McEwan) is concise and skillfully done, changing up the narrative a few times but always finding its way to something profound: “A crowd is a slow, stupid creature, far less intelligent than any one of its members.”
Desperate Characters (Paula Fox) has struggling, fairly self-obsessed characters I didn’t love, but moments in the writing like this: “Leon is right. When I open my mouth, toads fall out. I’m sorry.”
DeNiro’s Game (Rawi Hage) is an urgent, compelling novel about childhood friends growing up in war-torn Lebanon. Remarkable details, and if I found it the description overdone at times, I think that worked with the voices of young characters and the urgency.
Piranesi (Susanna Clarke) is an intriguing and skillfully written intellectual mystery, involving identity and a character in assorted rooms large enough to have hundreds of statues, and even cloud formations.
Gormenghast (Peake) is the middle part of a trilogy of novels set in a fictional world that reads a bit like Shakespeare. No dragons, just people and their own motivations, and it’s nothing short of remarkable with great moments in the writing. But start with Titus Groan.
Anomia (Jade Wallace) is reviewed below as a compelling but meaningful novel that doesn’t include gender for any of the characters.
The Road (Cormac McCarthy) immediately became one of my favourite novels for being as gripping as it was profound, with just the right amount of scattered poetic moments.
Confessions of a Crap Artist (Philip K Dick) is a pretty straight-up drama without any twist on reality, proving Dick can simply conjure up fascinating characters in a compelling story featuring “a collector of crackpot ideas,” and his impact on the world.
Mystery novels: The West End Horror (Nicholas Meyer) is a thoroughly engaging Sherlock Holmes mystery involving the theatre world with characters like Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde appearing.
Sherlock Holmes and the Great War (Simon Guerrier) was a compelling mystery but also involved a good amount of interesting historical detail that wasn’t awkwardly forced into the story.
Nonfiction: Grief is for People (Sloane Crosley) is a concise, deeply articulate memoir: “And no one is obliged to learn something from loss. This is a horrible thing we do to the newly stricken, encouraging them to remember the good times when they’re still in the fetal position. Like feeding steak to a baby.” It’s among the books I’ve reviewed below.
Best Canadian Essays 2025 (Emily Urquhart, editor) is another excellent book in the series, with relevant and skillfully written selections. It’s good to see the series going strong.
News of the World: Stories and Essays (Paula Fox) is something I read, having enjoyed Desperate Characters. As a collection, it was a bit hit-and-miss for me, but with some deeply worthy moments.
Lazy Bastardism (Carmine Starnino) is a book of poetry criticism that had me reaching for my highlighter often: “The real game of writing poetry remains the part that rests entirely on a lucky break: the creation of a singular, stand-alone word structure that satisfies emotionally and intellectually while signaling itself as an artifice. Have our poets been that lucky? Absolutely.”
Boldy Go, Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (William Shatner) features Shatner telling some interesting tales but also finding reverence, which I appreciated.
Graphic novels: I read many, but I think my favourite was Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness (Kristen Radtke) which manages to slowly and carefully get at something profound.
An honourable mention to Through a Life (Tom Haugomat) which fast-forwards through the decades of a life in a way that clarifies how fleeting life can be, and how valuable.
Poetry: Like a Trophy from the Sun (Jason Heroux), A Year of Last Things (Ondaatje), Talking to Strangers (Rhea Tregebov), Ways to Say We’re Not Alone (Simon Alderwick), National Animal (Derek Webster), Ghost Work (Robert Colman). I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me? (Nolan Natasha).
And Little Poems (an Everyman anthology edited by Michael Hennessy) was an excellent collection.
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Alex Boyd: BoydBlog 
Year in Review: 2025
Fiction: A House Without Spirits (David Homel) had characters that feel quite real, an intriguing premise about a writer getting to know a reclusive photographer, and lines like this: “The only difference between a rut and a grave is how deep.”
Enjoy Your Stay at the Shamrock Motel (Andrew Kaufman) is a set of linked stories I enjoyed both for their inventiveness and meaning.
Only Smoke (Millas) might speak to men than anyone else as a sort of fairy-tale about fatherhood, even as it’s a novel that’s a tribute to reading. The main character moves in to the apartment of a father he never knew and starts to get to know him through his books. I was a little puzzled by the abrupt ending, but a worthy book, for sure.
The Last Neanderthal (Claire Cameron) was unique, skillfully told and gripping.
Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro) is a novel I found slow, but I was thoroughly impressed with how convincing I eventually found the characters and moral questions.
Hangsaman (Shirley Jackson) was intriguing throughout, if not the most gripping Jackson novel.
Short fiction: The First Ten (Jamie Mathieson) and Pilgrimage to Earth (Robert Sheckley) are both books I’d recommend as inventive collections of SF stories, though you can really just track down anything by Sheckley, who wrote for decades. The First Ten, however, is the first ten stories to be self-published by Mathieson.
Genre fiction: The Demolished Man (Alfred Bester) is an extraordinarily inventive novel from the 1950s that reads like it could have been written today. Set in a world “everything has changed except for the ancient instinct for murder,” it was the first winner of the Hugo Award.
Lowfield (Mark Sampson) is reviewed below as a gripping horror novel set in PEI.
Titus Alone (Mervyn Peake) was, to be honest, a conclusion to the Gormenghast trilogy I found slim and a bit disappointing. But it has its moments, and the first two volumes of the trilogy are something extraordinary.
Dreamsnake (Vonda McIntyre) is a quietly brilliant book about pursuing knowledge and the struggle involved, even as it’s set in a post-apocalyptic world of the future. I already knew McIntyre from some of her excellent Star Trek novels.
Moonrise: The Golden Age of Lunar Adventures (Mike Ashley, editor) is a thoroughly enjoyable and intriguing set of stories written when people still imagined what life on the moon might be like.
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (Philip K Dick): The way some people are “noticed” by forces larger than themselves and buffeted around before ultimately fading into history (as even many of the more powerful fade into history) is an impressively handled and poignant theme here, and the idea of driving around in a “quibble,” must be my favourite term of all the terms I’ve seen invented by one SF writer or another. And for a book published in 1974 the idea of a “phone-grid sex network” is pretty impressive. But really, I’m not sure I’ve seen a writer tackle the idea we fade into history as poignantly since I read “The Bishop,” a story by Chekhov. It’s a story John Updike called the best short story ever written. Chekhov can perhaps be said to be more shoulder-shrugging about it, and Philip K. Dick. more cynical given the occasional truly repulsive character here, but it’s a worthy book now among my favourite SF novels.
Essays: In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times (James Cairns) is reviewed below as a meaningful and timely book.
Fan Mail: A Guide to What We Love, Loathe and Mourn (Jason Guriel) is a collection of immensely readable essays about books, music and film that I’ve reviewed below.
Court of Memory (James McConkey) has wisdom and grace to spare in a collection of essays I believe is now out of print. Essays written over a number of decades.
Best Canadian Essays 2026 (Brian Bethune, editor) is another fine, relevant collection in the series, now going strong since the 2009 edition. Do enough people know about it? Not yet.
Nonfiction: Stay Here With Me (Robert Olmstead) is an elegantly written memoir of that particular part of youth that never comes again.
My Dog Tulip (Ackerley) is a charming memoir of flawed but intensely meaningful love, with lines that are peak British, like “I permitted myself to be amused.”
On Book Banning (Ira Wells) is highly recommended as a concise, articulate look at the subject. Part of the Field Notes series from Biblioasis.
Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw: Travels in Search of Canada (Will Ferguson) is a book that again has me reaching for that word charming, even as Ferguson taught me about parts of the country I didn’t know.
Graphic novels: Absolute Wonder Woman (volume one) gets the feel of the character exactly right while re-imagining the story in a way I loved. Absolute Martian Manhunter (these are all reinventions of the characters) is a bit light on plot but has amazing art.
Space Ghost: With Only Ghosts to Comfort Us takes a character I enjoyed in cartoons as a child and re-imagines him as something closer to Batman, with terrific art.
The Hidden Life of Trees: A Graphic Adaptation (Wohlleben, adapted by Bernard and Flao) has extraordinary bits of information on the slow wisdom of trees we often fail to notice, never mind understand.
A Fire Story: A Graphic Memoir (Brian Fies) is a potent and highly readable memoir of losing almost everything and rebuilding.
Hope it All Works Out! and City Monster (Reza Farazmand) : the first is a collection of strips I loved for their oddness and charm, the second a graphic novel, both recommended.
Poems: This year I read Endpoint and Other poems (John Updike), a long but poignant final collection. The Essential Charles Bruce (edited by Carmine Starnino), Masculinity: An Anthology of Modern Voices (from Broken Sleep Books), and Quicker Than the Eye (Joe Fiorito) is a book I reviewed (link below).
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