In his smart, funny and satirical short story collection Fatal Errors, Paddy Scott offers up portraits of the alt-right movement, toxic masculinity and the technology that enables these movements and leads to loneliness, dehumanization and gullibility. 3 copies left as of July 4, 2020.
The Prejudgment Day Blues and other tales of comic woe gives us a blood thirsty character, a space travelling blunderer, a grieving widower and an ex-hippie trying to fit in. These are dark and quirky tales for the lonely and the quasi-cynics and those just trying to get through another night before the planet is burnt by the sun. Armageddon is just a heart beat away.
The four short stories in Keith Ebsary’s High on Life range from the absurd to the macabre to the silly and the dark. Trade is an attempt to get inside the gay male mind through the miracle of blowjobs. Fiend is a short and nasty tale of a sexually obsessed old man. Cut concerns a roid user who kidnaps an old woman, feeds her steroids and forces her to be his training partner. Madhouse features CBC radio announcers. With High on Life, Ebsary joins the DevilHouse pantheon of grit purveyors.
These are tiny stories that turn in surprising ways. They are witty. They are sharp. They are wry with humour. They are full of wonder in ordinary circumstance. In Imaginary Stories, rob mclennan applies his poetic sensibility for minimalism to prose. These tales have a magical allure.
DevilHouse’s latest offering is “4PM in Los Angeles” by former junk yard attendant, Steven Storrie, an American living in the UK. He runs the site “Black Coffee for Breakfast” http://renegadepriest11.wixsite.com/blackcoffeebreakfast where he conducts bad ass interviews about the end of the world and crimes we wish we’d committed. Storrie is the spawn of Hunter S. Thompson and Henry Miller with a little Bukowski swimming around in his DNA.
A man quits his job from the sanctuary of a dingy bar. A soldier remembers a perfect summer while lost behind enemy lines. Some poor sap arrives to his interview smelling like a fish pond and a strange man watches his neighbours from a window with a chip in the glass. All of them are laced with bitterness, longing and regret. The nagging belief that it was better long ago, before all this, somewhere…
4PM In Los Angeles is a collection of short stories for anyone unadapted to the horrors of modern life. It is for anyone lost and wandering alone. It is for anyone who ever loved a city and was cast out of it. It is for Monday morning Quarterbacks.
It is for anyone who knows that destruction does not always wait until after breakfast.
In No Guns No Knives No Disco Biscuits, a collection of creative nonfiction flash, hell looks a lot like 21st Century San Antonio, Texas. Eternal torment is summed up with, "You can only donate so much plasma. You can only drink so much Busch. You can only swallow so many pink Equate allergy pills. You can only swallow so much cum." The stories in this collection wail the blues in a karaoke dive bar where there's no redemption but plenty of gravitas, enough to keep a bitch busy until last call.
"No Guns No Knives No Disco Biscuits" is a 2016 volume in the DevilHouse Press series of transgressive chapbooks and is a collection of short stories by Misti Rainwater-Lites. The stories all revolve around the life experiences and flawed choices of the narrator, a young woman who has a strong belief in Astrology and an unerring ability to find heartbreak in her choices of men. At times she presents as a strong woman making unconventional choices and at other times those choices appear to be more a product her circumstances and previous choices such that we are reminded how we can view our life and choices differently depending on where we stand in our present day experience. Was our strength in the choosing or in the surviving of that choice? We yearn with her for the dreams she fails to experience and we cringe beside her in anticipation of knowing where “this choice” is leading. The stories are not told in chronological order but by the close of the chapbook they knit together. I got mine at a past Small Press Book fair but you can go to the DevilHouse website at www.devilhousepress.com and read the blog and order copies of the various volumes in the series." Bill Staubi, a reader. This note was posted first on FaceBook in July, 2019
In these two creepy stories, Walmsley smothers Leacock’s sunshine in black clouds. This is hardcore contemporary Canadian Gothic, stabbed, burned and soaked in blood.
In this collection, Babcock writes of gropes in dive bars, hookers, kidnappers, and suicide. Characters work as waitresses at the Rib Rack, clean toilets for a living, rent motel rooms for $140 a week, live on lentils, masturbate to cartoon anime girls, store urine in pop bottles, expose themselves to strangers on the subway. The roses may be brown-edged, but they bloom anyway.
The stories in Philip Quinn’s “Bird, Most Likely” range from sad tales of sickness to chilling portraits of rapists. There’s a wide variation in style in this work, from colloquial to formal. Nietzsche, Archie Bunker, John Lennon and Steve McQueen share the pages with hookers, projectionists, priests, flight attendants, redheads, and murderers. In this book, you’ll find blood and ether, broken glass, Japanese sports-cars, scratched 35-milimeter films, old photos, poison, trinkets, Indian Reserves, unleavened bread and unconsecrated wine. “Bird, Most Likely” is a refreshing glimpse into the neglected and forgotten, their unspoken crimes and preoccupations, characters who don’t fit in the polite society you read about in mainstream CanLit.
"Poignantly urban, surreal and post-realist — Philip Quinn’s Bird, Most Likely is a dark gem of Canadian transgressive writing which pulls back the surface of CanLit’s tame, bourgeois attitudes revealing exquisitely penned characters one seldom finds in polite society." Mark McCawley, Urban Graffiti
"The Tawdry Goat #1" is the 2014 inaugural volume in the Press’ offerings of transgressive literature that site wants to encourage authors to develop. The five authors present diverse stories that explore real and fantasy existences and relationships. Despite the short nature of each story the authors give a full immersive experience in the worlds they create and regardless of how foreign the details may be to your own experience elicit the knowing nod that comes from connecting with the love, the loss, the gain, the risk, or the reward that the characters experience despite the different route they may have taken form your own path. One of the joys of transgressive writing can be the frankness and directness with which things are named and shared and the Tawdry Goat #1 delivers on that freshness well. I got my copy at a past Small Press Book fair but you can go to the DevilHouse website at www.devilhousepress.com and read the blog and order copies of the various volumes in the series."
Bill Staubi, a reader, posted this on FaceBook in July, 2019.
A World of Yes , an erotic novel by Amanda Earl
It’s the early aughts. Palm Pilots are prevalent and people are still getting entangled in the cords of their telephones. Bonnie Clowd is a single woman living in Ottawa, Canada’s national capital. She has untameable hair, prefers big t-shirts to slinky dresses, and can’t seem to get the knack of polishing her nails without looking like an accident victim. She works at Blewstorm.com, an online dating site where “passion is just a storm away.” Her boss, Byron is a dreamy but married metrosexual who Bonnie would love to sleep with. Her occasional lover, Sean is a divorced civil servant who is wrapped up in his job and still in love with his ex. Her closest friend, Charlene, a nymphomaniac with dating advice that rivals Cosmo, insists on throwing Bonnie a party for her thirty-fifth birthday. Bonnie’s not very keen. She’s not sure what she wants to do with her life. Her Aunt Winnifred insists that it’s time Bonnie got married, had children and moved to the suburbs. She keeps setting her up with widowers whose best quality is that they own their own homes.