Reading A Mariner’s Guide to Self Sabotage, the new collection of short stories from Victoria writer Bill Gaston, is a strange and unsettling experience. On the one hand, the collection almost reads like an anthology, an overview of the varied and often surprising state of contemporary short fiction. The stories of A Mariner’s Guide to Self Sabotage draw on a variety of forms. The stories hang on internal conflict, resolved through an often abstract sense of culpability and shift in direction. Similarly, in the collection’s final story, “Drilling a Hole in Your Boat,” the gradual revelation of “your” plans for a final boat trip with “your” wife builds to a stark emotional honesty.

Source: thestar September 01, 2017 10:30 UTC