Juliet Was a Surprise
By Bill Gaston. Hamish Hamilton, 201 pp, softcover

Bill Gaston’s latest short-story collection is rich in common CanLit themes, and initially this seems a truly terrible thing. On the very first page of the very first story, “House Clowns”, we’re introduced to an aging and anxious urbanite and his atten­dant midlife crisis, which he’s decided to indulge at a lakeside cabin. On Page 2 we learn that he’s estranged from his adult son, Casey. Casey is adopted and now lives in Belgium; the symbolism of distance could not be more obvious. Page 4 introduces a portentously named pair of drifters, Adam and Eden. Tattooed and young, they’re the embodiment of otherness. Later on, there are inappropriate sexual fantasies, a canoe, and a random act of violence.

Do we need more evidence that Margaret Atwood’s Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature has had a long-lasting and pernicious influence? Gaston’s anonymous protagonist runs through Atwood’s four “victim positions” with such schematic fidelity that it’s almost comical, except that it isn’t. Through some mysterious alchemy, Gaston has managed to wring a quiet kind of horror from components that could easily collapse into a pile of creative-writing-class clichés.

If it’s a trick, it’s one that Gaston repeats again and again in Juliet Was a Surprise, sometimes with very similar ingredients. “Cake’s Chicken”, for instance, also employs a sylvan setting, a pair of vaguely demonic companions, and an excess of bad judgment. Yet even when the locale is very different—the Leonard Cohen concert of “Geriatric Arena Grope” or the Puerto Vallarta of “To Mexico”—the resulting mood is similarly unsettling.

One can only attribute this to skill, further evidence of which is supplied by an absence of evidence. His characters might be muddled, depressed, or lacking in social savoir-faire, but Gaston outlines their various predicaments in writing that’s gorgeously clear. The short-story format suits this laconic kind of approach, which seems informal but is in fact carefully, calculatedly succinct—and weirdly gripping, too.