Five Little Bitches
By Teresa McWhirter. Anvil, 296 pp, softcover

Woe to the novelist trying to depict a fictional rock band. Even heavy hitters like Don DeLillo and Jonathan Lethem couldn’t quite pull off a believable fictitious pop act in Great Jones Street (1973) and You Don’t Love Me Yet (2007), respectively. Perhaps Michael Turner has come as close as anyone in Hard Core Logo.

Five Little Bitches is no Hard Core Logo. The fourth novel by East Vancouver writer Teresa McWhirter, Bitches uses a few of that book’s techniques—including band ephemera like a shopping list and a magazine interview—but it tells a mostly linear story about Wet Leather, a quartet of Vancouver punk-rock chicks who find each other, start a band, and spend the rest of their brief career fighting among themselves.

Unfortunately, that’s about all we get. There’s little insight into the characters, whose problems read like an East Vancouver crusty-punk soap opera, and even less into the city’s music scene or the music industry in general. Heck, the book is even confused about what era it’s set in: Derek von Essen’s graphics, both inside and out, make it look like a novel about the early days of punk, but the description of Wet Leather’s music and people’s reaction to the band give the novel an early-’90s, L7-ish cast. But then, halfway through, a band website is mentioned, and toward the end a viral video is referred to.

Yet I will give Five Little Bitches this: a raw, punk energy courses through its veins like bad heroin through a Hastings Street junkie on a Friday night. (Sorry, slipped into some of the book’s bruising prose style there.) This isn’t always a good thing, though, as the book could have used an editorial intervention when it comes to lines like “each girl has different thoughts” (no kidding) and “Her feelings for him are more than just scrambled porn.” Does that come with a side of hash?

If the book had had a more thorough editorial going-over, and if McWhirter had chosen a specific era and done a little more research, Five Little Bitches might have had something to say. As it is, my one take-away from the book was a new slang term: turd holster. Thanks for that.