The God is Not Willing has been out for a few months. You can read more about the book and how it’s being received here, here, and here. If you have yet to pick up a copy, you can find it at all the usual places, Amazon, Chapters, Barnes and Noble, and my home town…
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(Barthes’ Death of the Author: Zombie Horror and Literary Criticism) Steven Erikson There is probably no greater terror for a scholar of literary criticism discussing a work of fiction than to have its author sitting in the audience. I’ve seen this often enough and I have great sympathy for their plight. I can see the unease, the occasional…
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In Memory of Anthony Buchner Sturgeon Falls lies between Numaru and Nutimik Lakes along the Winnipeg River. Unless one is familiar with Whiteshell Park and the river that marks its north boundary, the notion of a river might conjure images of your standard waterway, sleepily winding its way through the landscape, with treed banks. But the Winnipeg…
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(The Twisted Trees of Tie Creek) My wife is convinced that I live in a cloud, a mostly opaque cloud. I just don’t notice things. She has a point. The shoes that man was wearing, the pattern on that woman’s blouse, those visible panty-lines on those tight leggings (okay, maybe I noticed those visible panty-lines, but where she…
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A few years back I was in the last days of a long book tour through France, sponsored by my French publishers, Leha Editions. The last weekend before I flew back to Canada, I found myself attending a small Fantasy and SF festival just outside of Paris. After a walk back from the event in the fine…
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If memory serves, we didn’t get out to the site until the Autumn. The crew was small. The head archaeologist was Tony Buchner, with me as his assistant and one other archaeologist in tow. For part of the project, a Plains Cree from the Cypress Hills was hired, whose name was Harry Buffalo Calf. The Swift Current petroglyph…
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We weren’t going anywhere. It was June 1st, 1982. There were four of us, maybe five. Odd, but some people just fall away from memory. I’m pretty sure it was four. Definitely not more than five, because five is the maximum that can fit in a Pontiac Grand Prix, assuming only two up front, and when I recall the scene,…
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We’re a resilient species, but everyone has a limit, a threshold, beyond which anything can happen. When I think back on the summer and autumn of 1981, I am left shaking my head. I suppose the most well-known tale of going ‘bush-crazy’ is Stephen King’s The Shining. Never mind the supernatural elements of that novel, it’s about isolation. The Overlook…
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The Lesson of Saveock Water Let’s talk curses. In a way, we’re all cursed, right at birth. We’re cursed by the culture we’re born into. That culture begins, of course, with the family surrounding us. Then there’s the society our family’s immersed in, which may be variable as the years pass, but not too variable in the grand scheme…
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It was the morning after. The three guys on the crew sat around the firepit, nursing monstrous hangovers. It was the last day of the project and we were about to pile into the van for the return to Winnipeg. Those three guys were Kelly, Laury, and me. The local farmer’s strange little dog, Sport, was hanging around, suddenly…
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