December saw me on a mystery reading binge. Why do my thoughts turn to murder around Christmastime? Who can say…?

Fiction

Ocean Drive by Sam Wiebe

Hard-boiled British Columbia.

That’s what best describes Sam Wiebe’s Ocean Drive, a dirty thriller set in the idyllic community of White Rock on BC’s West Coast. Only this paradise by the water has a seamy underside of sex, drugs and murder. Lots of murder.

Ocean Drive tells two stories: that of Cam, a troubled young man who’s just been released from prison for manslaughter; and Meghan, a divorced “cop mom” who’s trying to solve a murder where Cam quickly becomes a suspect.

Both are caught up in a world of urban gangsters and a changing world, where the old farmland of the West Coast is being replaced by urban sprawl and casinos, and society is increasingly divided between the generationally wealthy and those who can never get ahead.

Ocean Drive could have been pulled from the headlines of BC’s newspapers — it has bloody gang warfare, crooked lawyers, desperate losers, infamous criminal brothers and cops that walk all the grey alleys in between.

You’ll never look at Beautiful BC the same again.

Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/200358289-ocean-drive

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Everyone On This Train Is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson

Author Ernest Cunningham joins a writers fest on a cross-country train in Australia in the hopes of finding inspiration to follow his debut book, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. You can probably see where this is going right away and, yes, his fellow travellers are a cast right out of a classic murder mystery novel in an even more classic setting. The bodies start piling up and each of the suspects has their own secrets, grudges and schemes — layers upon layers of secrets, grudges and schemes in fact. What makes the novel all the more fun is that the suspects are writers, publishers and agents.

And Everyone On This Train Is a Suspect is very fun. It’s not just a murder mystery with multiple bodies but a meta-mystery with one of the most unique and clever narrators ever in the genre. Cunningham — or is that Stevenson? — knows all the rules of mystery novels and delights in incorporating them all into his tale with conspiratorial charm, delivering a masterclass in storytelling to the reader in a wonderfully self-aware reinvention of the genre. It’s clever and funny while at the same time being a wicked mystery.

Truly a revelation!

Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167006698-everyone-on-this-train-is-a-suspect

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Rashomonster by Michael Allen Rose

This rather sums up this bizarro monster story:

“The wolfman, in human form, attended a birthday party, which his friends had put together for him. At some point in the evening, two children played a prank resulting in the wolfman being fully startled, and this caused an expulsion of breath beyond normal expectations, setting a nearby mummy on fire. The wolfman, still human, tried to extinguish said mummy, but due to a mixture of incompetence and comic misadventure, the wolfman caught fire as well, was horribly burned and otherwise injured, and proceeded to transform into a wolf, because of the stress. The wolfman was subsequently taken to the veterinarian by Frankenstein’s non-monstrous person consisting of collected body parts repurposed for new opportunities.”

Link: https://magazine.trollbreath.com/rashomonster-2/

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Non-fiction

How to Fix Book Publishing by Kenneth Whyte

Canadian-published books now account for less than 5% of the Canadian publishing market — and the situation is getting worse, not better. How to turn that around?

How about reinventing the PLR (public lending right program) to better reward authors with Canadian publishers and the publishers themselves?

Link: https://substack.com/home/post/p-180628703

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Keep Going by Austin Kleon

Keep Going by Austin Kleon is a slim little book but it’s one of my most highlighted books after only one read. Billing itself as a primer on “ways to stay creative in good times and bad,” Keep Going is an informal yet deeply insightful series of meditations on not only the importance of creativity but the sustainability of creativity.

Kleon acknowledges the world can beat down creatives but that a shift in mindset can keep creativity alive. Focus on the daily rituals and routines of creativity and find a “bliss station” so that the creative practice becomes not a means to some illusory goal but a meaningful thing on its own.

Keep Going isn’t a how-to manual or a deep dive into creative strategies and techniques. It’s a book about perspective and mental shifts and probably belongs on the same shelf as James Clear’s Atomic Habits and Ryan Holiday’s Stillness Is the Key. It extends beyond creativity to living a good life overall. As Kleon says in the book: “None of us know how many days we’ll have, so it’d be a shame to waste the ones we get.”

Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40591677-keep-going

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The Fall of the English Department by Adam Walker

There was a time in my life when I was a graduate student eyeing the contemplative life of a professor. The Fall of the English Department by Adam Walker lists more than a few of the reasons I eventually left the ivory tower for the delightful chaos of the outside world.

Link: https://substack.com/@adamgagewalker/p-177582596

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If Chatbots Can Replace Writers, It’s Because We Made Writing Replaceable by Andre Forget

“Market pressures are now so intense, and industries have become so consolidated, that a good deal of what gets published every year already reads like a photocopy of a photocopy.”

Publishing was already in trouble before AI turned up.

Link: https://thewalrus.ca/if-chatbots-can-replace-writers-its-because-we-made-writing-replaceable/

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Poetry

Grawlix by George Murray

They’re not done following you,

these childish angers, like stormy

weather pushing in, memories

hovering near the edge of the panel,

peripheral to the eye.

Link: https://thewalrus.ca/grawlix/