Taking CanLit into CanFantastic territory
Vancouver valkyries, space vampires, murderous monks, zombie actors and aboriginal super heroes? This isn’t Susanna Moodie’s CanLit.
Let’s face it — our national literature, if we can really use such a term, has long been known for literary fiction mostly focused on the troubled history of Canada. Or, perhaps more accurately, the troubled history of the geographical, cultural and social region known as Canada. But a number of Canadian writers have offered readers alternative worlds over the years. William Gibson, Robert Charles Wilson, Nalo Hopkinson, Guy Gavriel Kay, Robert Sawyer and Margaret Atwood, to name a few, have all written classics of sci-fi and fantasy that have ignored or even defied CanLit norms and have set free the imaginations of countless other writers.
Now a new generation of authors are increasingly making their mark on Canada’s literary landscape, mapping out novel regions of weirdness to create a creative zone I like to think of as CanFantastic. I’ve rounded up 13 of them in a nod to the number of Canada’s provinces and territories, but it’s by no means an exhaustive list. Feel free to share this list on your preferred social ecosystem and add your own favourites. Let’s make CanLit more fantastic!
The Winter Knight
by Jes Battis (ECW Press)
When one of the Knights of the Round Table is murdered in modern-day Vancouver, a valkyrie is tasked with solving the crime. She must navigate a secret world within the city, where she encounters spirits, strange beasts and legends come to life. Throw in a queer coming-of-age story, absolutely magical characters and enchanting prose, and you have one of the most original, inventive and fun novels in years.
High Times in the Low Parliament
by Kelly Robson (Tordotcom)
What do you get when you mix fantasy with political satire with romance and stoner comedy? One of the most magical books to ever come out of Canada. When a womanizing scribe in a kind of fantasy alternate version of old-timey Britain is sent to the Low Parliament she finds herself in the middle of a political crisis that could very well lead to a conflict with the faerie and the destruction of the parliament. The stakes are high in many senses of the word, as the main characters seem mostly interested in getting stoned and flirting while the politicians seem to be leading everyone to their doom with their empty rhetoric. That sounds familiar, sure, but this is a fantasy book, so the stoner scribes win the day. If only real life politics were this charming.
Crucible of Chaos
by Sebastien de Castell (Arcadia)
In de Castell’s latest instalment of his popular Greatcoats fantasy series, the melee magistrate Estevar Borros visits an ancient abbey to investigate strange rumours of new gods only to find the monks of the abbey have gone mad and are battling among themselves — while demons and other supernatural beings stalk the place. Borros must discover the truth of what is happening before it’s too late, not only for the monks but also for him! Crucible of Chaos is like a mix of The Name of the Rose, Don Quixote and The Three Musketeers, mixed in a gothic stew and spiced up with de Castell’s trademark wit and clever turns. It’s one of the best Greatcoats books yet.
Take Us to Your Chief
by Drew Hayden Taylor (Douglas & McIntyre)
Sci-fi and superhero tales meet Indigenous myth and culture in this darkly comic and quirky collection from Drew Hayden Taylor. The government spies on indigenous people through dream catchers. An aboriginal superhero is born from a toxic mix of tainted water, fertilizer, radon gas and black mould. A troubled youth travels back in time using petroglyphs. Spirits occupy the toys of a suicidal teen. And more! It’s a new perspective on traditional sci-fi storytelling — or at least a different one that we haven’t seen enough of. I hope that Take Us to Your Chief follows sci-fi tradition and gives us a bunch of sequels.
Total Party Kill
by Craig Francis Power (Breakwater Books)
Total Party Kill mashes up Dungeons & Dragons adventures with addiction memoir with trauma chronicle with pop culture fever dream to deliver a treasure chest of literary gems. Are they peculiar poems? Weird flash fiction? Mad confessions? Some new creature entirely? Yes. Brilliant and indescribable, Total Party Kill is a natural 20 of artistic accomplishment.
A Tidy Armageddon
by Brian Panhuyzen (ECW Press)
A group of soldiers emerges from a bunker to find the world has gone through some sort of mysterious apocalypse that has left civilization dismantled and organized into endless blocks of items stacked as high as buildings — cars and plastic spoons and fake Christmas trees and cans of soup and everything else you can think of. Who is behind this strange end of the world, and has anyone else survived? It’s the question the soldiers set out to answer, but the more they explore their new world, the stranger things get. An eerie coming-of-end tale that makes us turn a mirror upon ourselves — a whole block of mirrors.
Gods of Jade and Shadow
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey)
A dreamlike tale of a young woman in servitude to her family in Jazz Age Mexico who opens a mysterious chest in her grandfather’s room and releases the imprisoned Mayan god of death. The god wants her help in recovering his lost throne from his treacherous brother, which is not really a request you can turn down. Their quest takes them across Mexico and into the underworld itself in a journey straight out of myth. Moreno-Garcia has earned an international reputation for being a master fabulist, and Gods of Jade and Shadow is perhaps her most magical work yet.
Blindsight
by Peter Watts (Tor Books)
A First Contact sci-fi novel with truly alien aliens, a dystopian society, genetically engineered humans that may not be an improvement on the original models, virtual heavens . . . and vampires. If it sounds like an odd fusion of sci-fi and genre tropes, that’s because it is — but every part of it just works and they come together to form a modern sci-fi classic. Even the vampire angle, which is plain weird in a sci-fi novel, is completely believable — and absolutely brilliant. In the spirit of a sci-fi novel of Big Ideas, Blindsight is also a densely layered exploration mission into the meaning of consciousness and the nature of life, where perhaps the most alien thing in the universe is us. Blindsight is one of the strangest sci-fi novels ever but also one of the most intriguing and unforgettable, like a mysterious signal from another part of the universe.
Husk
by Corey Redekop (ECW Press)
A blackly comic tale of a struggling actor who dies in obscurity and comes to as a zombie who still has to pay the bills and figure out a way to persist if not survive. Husk rips open the bloated corpses of celebrity culture, family drama, genre clichés and romance to offer up a literary feast for readers. The underground classic by Corey Redekop is as brilliant as it is grotesque. Where’s the movie adaptation already?
The Midnight Games
by David Neil Lee (Poplar Press)
Ancient, Lovecraftian gods are trying to cross over from other realms into our own, and the gateway they have chosen is . . . Hamilton? If it seems strange to you, it’s also strange to teenaged Nate, who stumbles across a cult of disenfranchised Hamiltonians trying to summon Yog-Sothoth during a midnight ritual at the city’s Ivor Wynne football stadium. Realizing the fate of the world may well be at stake, Nate tries to stop the cult with the help of the odd Lovecraft Underground organization and a strange creature not of this universe. The battle for Hamilton is on and the outcome will affect all of existence. A quirky and clever horror novel that puts Canada right at the centre of cosmic significance.
A Book of Tongues
by Gemma Files (Open Road Media)
Gemma Files’ Hexslinger series is possibly the weirdest weird western ever written. A Pinkerton detective is sent to infiltrate a vicious outlaw gang led by a murderous sorcerer and his volatile lover, only to find things are about to get worse because of a dead god that wants to turn the world into Hell. It’s a horrifyingly beautiful tale, as lyrical as Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and perhaps even more deranged and grotesque than that classic novel. There’s not a likeable character in the whole novel but each one of them is so compelling in their own way that you have no choice but to follow their strange and twisted tales to the bloody, apocalyptic and eerily enchanting ends.
Even Though I Knew the End
by C.L. Polk (Tordotcom)
Urban fantasy meets Sapphic noir in this tale of a detective trying to solve a string of supernatural murders in gumshoe Chicago, where her very soul is at stake. There are angels, demons, dark magic, twisted family relationships, loads of literary subversion and prose that will cast a spell on you.
Bonus Reads!
If you’re still looking for more reads, I recommend Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction Vol. 1, which features stories and poems by Kate Heartfield, Eric Choi, Colleen Anderson, P.A. Cornell, Fawaz Al-Matrouk, Leah Bobet, Premee Mohamed and more. Volume Two is now in the Kickstarter stage and features works by Cory Doctorow, Derek Künsken, Amal El-Mohtar, Julie E. Czerneda, A.C. Wise, David Clink and more.
Peter Darbyshire is the author of six books and more stories than he can remember. He lives near Vancouver, British Columbia, where he spends his time writing, raising children and playing D&D with other writers. It’s a good life.
