David Yoon

It makes sense that Cyclopedia Exotica got its start as a serialized Instagram comic. Every so often you get a quick four panel set-up and punchline, but it's at its best when it gets to stretch its legs and tell a story. Across a large ensemble it speaks to microaggressions, tokenization, self-loathing, and marginalization with cyclops as a clear stand-in for the other. But there's also stuff here about finding love, as well as worries about selling out, growing up and settling down. I'm not sure I need to know that male cyclops have two-pronged penises and that female cyclops have 3 vaginas which leads to (naturally) a second womb where a not-twin baby will grow simultaneously in embryonic diapause. I get it, they're different - they're cyclops! And yes, many a set-up and punchline fall flat and feel obvious, but on the whole the work is still a light distraction that never takes itself too seriously while poking at often serious topics.

When the first story introduces us to a formless mass made of fallen out hair, feces and toilet paper that utters the word “Mother!” before being flushed down the toilet — you're not exactly sure what you're in for. This collection of short stories / modern day fairytales benefit from the stellar translation of Anton Sur and are by turns hilarious, horrifying and more than a little absurd. Bora Chung walks a fine line that balances all these elements and arrives at something unexpected — not always mind you, one of the stories fell completely flat for me — but there's always going to be hits and misses with a collection like this. Chung is otherwise throwing twist upon twist and I love her bent toward horror, the very Korean theme of revenge, and the price of human greed.

Nagle posits the alt-right's misogynist, transphobic, and racist worldview is just a toxic, in it for the lulz, ironic reaction to overzealous social justice warriors with their fervent “Tumblr liberalism”. The left's ascendency during the Obama years defined by its “culture of fragility and victimhood mixed with a vicious culture of group attacks, group shaming, and attempts to destroy the reputations and lives of others within their political milieu” escalated into hysteria. Increasingly the rhetoric at the edges became anti-male, anti-white, anti-straight, and anti-cis and it has been performatively adopted by the mainstream as it capes for Pride, #BLM and #MeToo.

In that sense Nagle takes alt-light figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos at his word, that the right has become the counterculture; modern day punks focused on transgression against the dominant morality, a big middle finger to the progressive status quo. The right has learned from the left, has better weaponized online aggression, and created more compelling myths that speak to those that can't keep up with the new woke language of gatekeeping, gender fluidity, cultural appropriation, white feminism et al. “America, Fuck Yeah” is just easier to grasp.

These swings come fast and it will be interesting to see how the alt right evolves given their many pronged attack on journalism, constantly moving the Overton window and a pandemic that has backed people into corners looking for easy to grasp narratives that reassuringly tell them who to blame. The left seems to just resort to cultural politics, shaking their head at how dumb the right is and patting themselves on the back for how not-racist they are. That doesn't seem to be working and the rise of the dirtbag left seems like an interesting reaction to watch. I'd love for Nagle to tackle this again now that it's 5 years later.

“Loneliness is one of the most universal things a person can feel” It's become all the more clear as this graphic novel drops in the midst of a pandemic that has seen folks physically isolated from one another. But Radtke argues that loneliness isn't just “tied to having a partner or best friend - it is the gap between the relationships you have and the relationships you want.”

And the stakes are incredibly high. Across 70 studies examining over 3 million subjects, what becomes clear is that isolation kills. Those experiencing feelings of loneliness were more likely to be dead by the time the studies were over. Radtke also cites political philosopher Hannah Arendt who notes that loneliness is the common ground for terror. When we lose contact with one another, so too do we begin to perforate ourselves from reality. The feelings of being alone can morph into the more antagonistic “everyone is against me”. This can lead to defensiveness and an inability to try and connect meaningfully with others, evolving into extremism, partisan rhetoric and even violence.

Radtke is happy to explore this idea of loneliness into whatever nooks and crannies her research takes her. From the advent of the laugh track and it's triggering of the premotor cortex releasing endorphins and maybe unconsciously “coaxing a solitary viewer into a sense that she isn't, in fact, alone.” To our culture's fixation on bootstrap ideologies and the stoic loner staring off into the middle distance, the gritty cowboy riding into town alone. And the pioneering, and massively problematic not to mention wildly unethical studies of Harry Harlow who nonetheless changed our understanding of affection and “quite literally proclaimed the power of love.”

It's an intimate journey, beautifully rendered.

First published in Japan in 1951, it gets a ton of leeway in my reading. It's akin to the badly dubbed, Sunday afternoon, kung-fu movies of my youth that I absolutely loved in all their over-the-top, cheesy glory. The book can be a tad extra - I mean there's just so much nervous sweating going on! Every other chapter is the literary equivalent of the dramatic hamster meme turning his head in wide-eyed wonder accompanied by a musical sting. The author never tires of reminding us how beautiful young Tamayo is and even as the story resolved I admit I'm still not exactly sure what Sahei had in mind with his will. But it doesn't matter! It was a distracting and fun romp.

You have the incredibly wealthy Silk King of Japan, Sahei Inugami, who has died. Detective Kosuke Kindaichi has been called to the reading of the will which will surely will be an “event soaked in blood” according to on of the estate's lawyers Toyoichiro Wakabayashi ...who is immediately discovered dead from poison. Dun, dun, duuuuunn.

It's yet another intriguing case for Kosuke Kindaichi who has been featured in over 75 novels and feels like a progenitor to Columbo with his disheveled attire, wild hair, which he is prone to nervously scratching, while stuttering from excitement. And the plot is very Knives Out as the extended family descend like vultures vying for the family wealth. The body count mounts and we are left to wonder who will be the last one standing? It's got that old school, Agatha Christie classic mystery vibe but at the same time it just goes for it. What's not to like?

What unlocked this for me is that it's 2021's National Book Award for Fiction, following last year's win of Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu. And to me they feel like the same book, different race. And yes, here is where I emphasize I'm not conflating the minimization of Asian representation on screen to the dangers of being Black in America.

They're both pieces of metafiction that speak to their marginalized experience with humor and surreal flourishes. And maybe I just need to engage with them both more deeply to get beyond my basic interpretation and the feel that they're both just hammering you over the head with their points. The same straight shot of injustices with a bit of Hollywood tinged, imaginative English on the literary ball.

Hell of A Book is about the trauma of being black. Police shootings are just background noise in American life. By not naming the boy that's been shot and on everyone's lips here in the story, it makes it clear this could be anytime - 20 years ago or tomorrow. There's always a dead Black boy on the news that's got everyone buzzing and wringing their hands - and yet nothing has changed. The author who is faced with that reality vs his media handlers who want stories of love with Disney endings retreats into booze, random assignations, imaginary friends and noir movie dialogue as one does.

Mott's got a lot of ideas on the go here and maybe it's both a sharp indictment and canny commentary that this thought provoking examination of Black life in America enrages and elicits knowing nods as I'm reading but fails to really stick with me past the last page.

This was the most Korean-American book I've ever read and an absolute stunning debut short story collection. Easily my favourite read of 2021. All killer, no filler — I can't recommend this book enough.

The entire collection is perfectly balanced. Naturally there is the singular thread focusing on Korean immigrant stories, but from a wide spectrum of voices. We have the girl heading into third grade following the aging couple working at a convenience store. The middle-aged autistic piano prodigy tells one story while a sullen teenaged Korean adoptee tells another. And while there isn't a single personal counterpart for me here on the page, they all struck an immediate and visceral chord within me. Every story feels deeply connected to my own experience.

Even more stunning is that these stories don't centre whiteness the way traditional immigrant narratives tend to. The Koreans here aren't outsiders looking in, there's no smelly lunchbox story. The collection doesn't set out to highlight tensions these characters might feel in their newly adopted land when thrown against a predominantly black and white backdrop. It's Koreans talking about Koreans and centering their own deeply personal experiences. I am screaming.

You don't have to be a second generation Korean to enjoy this book (though it doesn't hurt). The writing is just stellar and this is a jaw-dropping debut from an author I can't wait to see more from.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Hope is a curse. It's putting your faith in something outside yourself, beyond the current moment. It's that future state where your inbox is empty, your tasks well and tightly under control and your time, at last, your own to fully direct towards what gives you joy.

For the productivity minded among us, we live in a perpetual state of hope, inhabiting an imagined future where our lives are well and truly ordered and organized. We need to give up hope and simply do the work. The Germans have a word for it, Eigenzeit, the time integral to a process itself. If a thing's worth doing, it takes as long as it takes.

Aside from the Appendix at the end of the book that includes a list of 10 tools for “embracing your finitude” - tacked on as if to meet some self-help, productivity book criteria, this is more an entertaining philosophical treatise than time management system.

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Becoming more efficient only brings about more work. Your immediate email responses in the hopes of reaching inbox zero only invite further emails. Your FOMO is forgetting that your entire life consists of things you are choosing to neglect. The real measure of any time management technique, according to Burkeman, is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.

So embrace the limits of your life. Choose to fail at things. Limit technology in favour of savouring the mundane and get good at doing nothing.

First off I need to say I read the edition, while most common, is an English translation of the French translation that the author himself considered “poor” from the original Polish it was written in. The fact this exists is cuckoo and I'm sad I didn't know better to look for the 2011 Bill Johnston Polish to English translation.

I'm sure I've gotten the gist of it anyways. Lem hated traditional science fiction dismissing it as superficial. It's a similar complaint my wife has of Star Trek, dismissing it as adults dressed in pyjamas pretending they're in space. Hurtful.

Lem takes our anthropomorphized galactic view of bipedal creatures with eyes and mouth at recognizable positions where our only impediment to communication is learning the language and throws that out the window. Instead we get a sentient ocean with the power of “seeing into the deepest recesses of human minds and then bringing their dreams to life.” Communication in the form of near perfect human replicas pulled from the minds of the scientists sent to observe the planet. It's a baby God playing at creation, stumbling toward understanding. The ocean is poking at these planetary interlopers with tools that are in sharp contrast to the scientists resorting to blunt instruments, bombarding the ocean with x-rays modulated by human brain waves. We're cavemen in the face of this new lifeform and our century of human research is confined to leather bound volumes that speak more of superstition and creative interpretations than real scientific progress and understanding.

This massive disparity creates a pervasive sense of potential menace and uncertainty that begins to fray at the scientist's minds. They know enough to be a danger to themselves, which feels ever relevant.

So yeah, I grok the ideas explored here, but found the reading experience a bit plodding and felt like I could have gotten the same gist with a well sharpened short story.

Some serious Never Let Me Go vibes and an underlying current of anxiety that pervades the story. This future world finds 14-year-old Josie on tenuous ground after being “lifted”. There is the very real possibility that she might succumb to the treatment and there is this looming sense of impending loss. Klara, an AF or Artificial Friend, enters the picture to be Josie's companion and eagerly observes the world she now finds herself in.

And that's it. That's all I can talk about without spoiling the book really. Because I want to get into a discussion about how existentially dark AF this book is. About how it examines class structure and is a sharp reflection of the current dystopian hellscape we live in. How parents must face their own obsolescence while making life or death decisions for their children, and the complicated and often implicating motives therein. How we all end up on our own. Ishiguro may be a master of restraint but this thing has teeth, hovering at the periphery of this otherwise sunny, affectless, robot-narrated remembrance.

...and he dedicated the book to his late mother.

The Argus is poised at the very edge of the universe. Not metaphorically speaking in some far flung corner within the vast expanse of space, but quite literally at the edge of the expanding universe. The Argus is looking out into the dark nothing that sits beyond the realm of our known reality, guarding against the possible return of the Viators that took humanity to the brink of extinction centuries ago.

This space station is home to a motley crew of court-martialled space marines, Viator/human hybrids called Savants and an exiled royal heir to the empire. They are among the two thousand souls about to bear witness to the contracting of the known universe. The dark outer boundary seems to be moving inwards and wreaking havoc on the timeline.

Turns out that's just the least of their worries. Political machinations, unfathomable threats, and a healthy dose of WTF promises a wild ride. Sure Cavalon Mercer is somehow a rebellious anti-authoritarian who also holds doctorates in genetic engineering, astromechanical engineering, and astrophysics with a minor in ‘gravitational tempology.” And frankly it's weird that every chapter insists on pointing to something that is made of “aerasteel”. But this is equal parts The Expanse meets Battlestar Galactica and I'm fully on board for the ride.

So Elsa is a Korean-American physicist who's escaped to the South Pole, which frankly is about as far away as you can get from your immigrant family on the planet. But there, in the waning last days of the Antarctic's endless daytime, she is visited by her childhood imaginary friend.

There's a lot going on here. The stories overlay each other and reveal something larger when combined. Elsa is researching neutrinos, elemental particles born from cataclysmic violence. Elusive and never seen they're called “ghost particles” From particle physics to ancient folklore and the Emmileh Bell which only finds its voice when a monk casts a child into the molten metal, its ring a child's call to her mother. All of it echoes the tragic history that burdens Elsa's own mother.

That puzzle box of a novel would be achievement enough but entangled within are the stories of Elsa's brother, more than a little messed up and rebelling against the cliched immigrant parent expectations. And Elsa's boyfriend, the wonderfully named Oskar Gantelius, the ethnically Korean adoptee of Swedish parents helping her unlock the secrets buried in her mother's folklore stories while figuring out who he is exactly. And don't forget that ghostly unseen friend that may or may not be her own lost sister from when her mother disappeared to Korea.

Technical difficulty is off the charts and the book rewards some close, considered reading.

I wanted to like it more, but it's telling how it already feels dated having been published in 2017. It misses the ascendency of Twitter wielded by the former president of the United States, the sheer algorithmic power of TikTok to deliver an infinite scroll of short, personalized dopamine hits, the introduction of Meta as Mark Zuckerberg wrestles with how to hook a new generation of users as its Facebook base ages out. And all of this in the midst of a pandemic where we find ourselves increasingly online. Where parents, finding no other recourse, increasingly submit to relying on screens to occupy their children. Where children see little difference between their parents working hours, staring at a screen, and their off hours staring at another screen. The Internet in the midst of a pandemic becomes a human right, an absolute necessity. Irresistible become irreplaceable.

Still, there are fun little digressions into the history of Tetris, Steve Jobs' luddite tendencies when it came to his kids and Freud's obsession with cocaine. I would however like a word with the monsters that purposely induced visual amblyopia in kittens, permanently pickling their visual cortex.

It's the summer of 2002 and 18 year old Kim Hae-on is found dead, the victim of blunt force trauma to the head. The High School Beauty Murder, as it is come to be known, vacillated between two possible suspects; the wealthy Shin Jeongjun who was seen driving Hae-on that fateful day and Han Manu, an awkward delivery boy who had seen them both in their fancy SUV. It's Serial by way of Parasite.

The book spans 27 years over its 8 chapters moving between 3 narrators caught in the aftershocks of that tragic event. Kim Da-on, Hae-on's sister, has “pondered, prodded, and worked every detail” in the ensuing years. Consumed by her death she even undergoes surgery to appear more like her beautiful sister. Yum Taerim, a witness on that fateful day, is a woman unravelling as we eavesdrop into her conversations with helplines and doctors. And finally Sanghui, a friend of Da-on who offers her own unique insight as the years go on.

It's a slight book that prompted a quick second reading that revealed additional layers to the story. It defies genre categorization and like so much of the translated Korean works that make its way here, is a disquieting, open-ended read that flirts with the surreal. It's a whole vibe that I'm only just starting to get the hang of.

“The two kinds of people in this world aren't good and bad — they're engines and fuel.”

9 year old Amir Utu washes up on shore amidst a mass of shipwrecked bodies, distended with seawater. Sprawled facedown, arms outstretched he is surrounded by the wreckage of the boat he once sat on. Police pull caution tape along the walkway that leads to the beach that lies in the shadow of a luxury hotel. The guest rumble about their ruined day, now confined to the hotel grounds. There are angry requests for refunds.

The boy opens his eyes and sees two men approach in baggy white containment suits. He runs.

Beautifully written with a spare storyline bisected into Before and After. After, we see Amir lost on this new island, helped by 15 year old Vanna. Before, we find out how Amir finds himself aboard the Calypso, crowded among the other refugees. They remain hopeful, armed with newly minted Western names, wielding crucifixes and memorizing mantras in English: “Hello. I am pregnant. I will have a baby on April twenty-eight. I need hospital and doctor to have safe baby. Please help.”

It's a simple story, that is devastating in its little details.

The off-season and empty ski lodge nestled in the French Alps provides the perfectly creepy setting for this locked chalet mystery. 5 friends, mostly competitive snowboarders, reconvene after 10 years apart, drawn together with a mysterious invite. It quickly becomes clear that there is a more sinister motive for bringing the band back together.

The chapters flip back and forth across the decade leading us to the mysterious disappearance of one of their own. Everyone seems to have a motive for wishing Saskia Sparks gone, and in flashbacks it's pretty clear that she is Just. The. WORST.

Author Allie Reynolds is a former pro-snowboarder and the details of the setting brought me back to my many hours on the hills. But with thrillers as in snowboarding it's all about how well you stick the landing and this thing was a bit of a yard sale (apologies for the ancient skiing slang creeping into a book about snowboarding) From the (hopefully this is vague enough) weakly established motive to the confluence of culpability that veered into hilarity, Reynolds gets points for technical difficulty but is ultimately docked on execution.

Zhu Chongba is destined for greatness with deeds that will bring a hundred generations of pride to the family name as foreseen by the local fortune teller. But when he dies his sister takes his name, determined to capture his fated greatness while escaping Heaven's notice. This Zhu Chongba soon finds herself at Wuhuang Monastery.

Zhu will stop at nothing to realize the greatness she is determined to steal for herself. She's no Mulan. Zhu is equal parts ingenious, ruthless, lucky, and entirely single-minded in her pursuit.

Her story shadows Ouyang, the castrated general serving the son of the man responsible for the death of his family and his own mutilated body. (It's a lot) The son, Lord Esen-Temur, is the leader of the Great Yuan's armies, a bit of a privlieged himbo, and completely devoted to Ouyang who is no less committed to his particular path.

Zhu and Ouyang will find themselves face to face time and time again, each pursuing their own private goals. I was just ready for some bloody 14th century political scheming, backstabbing and unbridled ambition in the waning years of the Yuan dynasty. Worthy of the hype it's getting here in Canada from our largest book retailer.

Trust me, you don't know where this one is going. We open with Ludger Sylbaris, the lone survivor of the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelee who escaped to Mexico where he posthumously wrote a book about the inhabitants of Saint-Pierre spouting badger tails, or having two penises. Is this early evidence of symptomers or a clue to the raving paranoia of those locked in their own tiny cages?

Symptomers, it's posited, are humanity's next stage, a new species of people who consume gasoline, eat steel, edit their memories, or have trees growing out from them. And they're all there in Cabinet 13 for Deok-Geun to discover. The book moves along in a series of vignettes that linger at the edges of surreal and disaffected. Someone wants to become a cat, someone else spends half a year methodically drinking 12,000 beers, there's a gluttonous episode in a sushi bar and a violent interrogation. But why? It's a mad, mad world.

Normcore narrative fiction ...and I unapologetically loved it!

I get it. At 600 page, a half dozen protagonists, and three different eras telling a pastoral epic, eco-literary treatise and sci-fi exploration this should feel overindulgent. I worried that it was evidence of a literary giant at the height of his influence eschewing the mitigating influence of a sharp editor and allowed to just ramble on. But I was fully here for it.

It goes without saying that it's been a year and I'm frankly exhausted. So I'm just perfectly primed for this bit of storytelling magic concocted to tuck us in at night. Anthony Doerr knows that when it comes to stories “if it's told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.”

I'm here for the harelipped Omeir's deep understanding of his beloved oxen Tree and Moonlight. I feel that primal, earthy connection Seymour Stuhlman has staring into the eyes of the great grey owl he names Trustyfriend. I co-sign on the power of libraries and the enduring strength of a good story. I'm even down with the “dull-witted, mutton-headed lamebrain” Aethon dreaming of a city in the sky.

This is a bedtime story for adults. At 600 pages I would have happily read 600 more. I was content to just follow along as Doer unspooled this meandering narrative. I'm Fred Savage being read to by Peter Falk in the Princess Bride. This is uncomplicated and cozy and exactly the book I needed to read at the right time. Pure magic.

You don't get to be the the world's best-selling mystery novel and seventh most popular book of all time with over 100 million copies sold without some solid chops. Christie has got game for days.

This was just a wonderfully nostalgic read for me. It reminded me of all the Agatha Christie I'd devoured as a kid, pulling story after story from the library. Poirot, Marples and more have occupied me for many a quiet hour and yet I'd somehow missed this one.

A straight ahead thriller that announces from the onset (at least in my edition) that Christie was playing fair. That it would have a perfectly reasonable explanation with clues for a discerning reader to perhaps suss out the mastermind. That alone would have been a feat, but add 10 guests on a mysterious island slowly meeting their demise in line with the children's poem that girds the story and it's nothing short of a wonder.

Christie wastes no time. This is a slim mystery that's tight as a drum delineating the 10 characters, their past crimes that landed them on the island, and their slow, inevitable elimination until there were none. Just a wonderfully cozy (yet murderous) reading experience.

Richard Powers absconded to the old growth forests of Tennessee which prompted the fantastic, Pulitzer Prize winning Overstory. Bewilderment feels like a continuation of that book.

Instead of eco-warriors, Powers resorts to the cliched trope of neurodivergent child who speaks plainly of the impending climate crisis, who sees the loss of biodiversity with stark clarity and asks “Why is it so hard for people to see what's happening?

It's easy to screw this up and in less capable hands (or through the eyes of more cynical readers) it's going to come off as cloying and sentimental. And yet I loved the fierce love Theo Byrne has for his 9 year old son Robin, and how lost he feels without his wife to help navigate his erratic rages. How doctors seek to quell his behaviour with drugs, how pediatricians are keen to place Robin on a spectrum.

“I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That's what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.”

It's that sort of language that Powers invokes that you can either hang with or roll your eyes right into the back of your head. I thought he earned that and that Theo perfectly embodies how much you can love your child and fear, everyday, that you're doing something that's going to ruin them. What it is to wrestle with being a parent in the midst of a climate crisis and the slowly looming end of the world.

That is the chewy centre of the book and rest is confection. I found the imagined extrasolar planets meandering but pretty diversions and the Decoded Neurofeedback a handy plot device to better centre Robin for the sake of moving the story forward and creating the arc of the narrative. PS. totally did not know that rock cairns were a bad thing.

It's a weird bit of cognitive dissonance in that it totally reads like a translated Korean novel. Simple sentences with lots of room to breathe, a bare atmosphere driven by the merest whisper of a plot, and a melancholic air to the whole thing. I'm thinking Untold Night and Day or the short stories of Ha Seong-nan, except this was translated from the French.

It is set in Korea however in the the seaside town of Sokcho, mere minutes from North Korea. We're introduced to a 20 something French Korean woman working as a receptionist at an aging guest house. She's back home after a stint at university and mostly bored. Her mother is working the nearby seafood market waiting for her to marry her absent boyfriend who's off modelling in Seoul.

Meanwhile she bides her time during the quiet winter off season cooking and cleaning for the few patrons still remaining at the guest house. The young girl recovering from plastic surgery and an enigmatic visiting French cartoonist. That's about the extent of it.

The whole thing, as slight as it is, still manages to get under your skin.

I don't know man.

I'd been having trouble connecting with the voice of the thing, the loping regional vernacular. I'm nearly 100 pages in before its weird paranoid rambling just goes from 0 to holy crap in a few short pages. The following act is filed with so many uncanny contrivances and over orchestrated set pieces that it starts feeling encumbered and I'm almost relieved to have a basketball game to turn to.

Just a little lost I guess. It's weird to frame the native deaths at the hands of angry white bar patrons and police as a reckoning for their own past acts. The innocents made bloody collateral in this karmic war. How the circle gets closed. It's scattered and uneven, the pacing hiccupping along in sporadic bursts instead of truly building tension and clarifying the stakes.

Eternity Martis left the multicultural streets of Toronto to attend the mostly white Western University and encounters the usual litany of micro-aggressions and racially motivated hostility. A bi-racial woman by way of an absent Jamaican father and a Pakistani mother, she is still perceived by the world as black. Despite growing up on curry, keema and nihari she is still expected to weigh in on behalf of Black people when slavery is brought up in class, is tokenized by men looking to go black, calling her Ebony, Ma or Chocolate, looked to for a pass to say the n-word from friends, endure blackface Halloween costumes, repel constant hair-touching requests and even face numerous incidents of outright hostility and a very real threat of violence.

And hell, that would have been meaty enough for this debut memoir but the title tag mentions race, campus life and growing up. There is her candid and unflinching look at her time as a victim of intimate partner violence. How despite lecturing younger girls about dating violence and recognizing red flags she finds herself blind to those same warning signs. That even as her abuser moved on, she still found herself wanting to reach out and connect again. And then to making the same mistakes with subsequent boyfriends, once again missing the clear signals.

It's an examination of rape culture still prevalent at university, of waving off indiscretions with a “boys will be boys” and dismissing bad behaviour as just “being dumb”. The staggering figure that 1 in 5 women will experience some form of sexual assault while at university. That women under 25 experience the highest rate of sexual violence in Canada. That up to 50% of students across Canadian universities claim no one has ever educated them on how to report a sexual assault.

It's also about how friends can find themselves drifting apart as each seeks to find their own path. How your goals and vision of the future you dream for yourself can change as you progress through the years of post-secondary life. This isn't just a memoir, this is deeply personal, long-form reportage from the trenches of Canadian academia right now and an examination of university as a crucible for immense change and growth.

Lynette Tarkington is a final girl. The last one standing after the blood soaked rampage of some deranged maniac. But after the killer is caught or killed and the world moves on, after the failed movie deals, book tours, talk show rounds and the constant hounding to sign blood soaked murderbelia passes, what becomes of these final girls? In Lynette's case she becomes a uber-paranoid, ultra-militant, agoraphobe with a houseplant named Fine for a pet that only comes out of hiding to attend therapy with other final girls. When one of the group is found murdered, she's convinced all their lives are in danger.

These final girls are clearly modelled after some classic slasher scream queens. Lynette's story is pulled from the little known Christmas horror Silent Night, Deadly Night but we also have Marilyn who is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dani is Halloween, Heather is Nightmare on Elm Street, Julia is Scream and Adrienne, who's death kicks off the story, is from Friday the 13th. When she's found dead it's up to Lynette to warn the others and find out who wants them all dead.

But let's not forget Lynette is wrestling with her own demons. She obsessively tracks peoples shoes when she's outside because stalkers can easily change outfits but rarely their shoes. She's got bugout bags stashed all over town, doubles back on buses and never takes the elevator. She's sequestered herself in such a tiny little life of her own that she's not exactly great at empathy and interpreting social cues. Her fears come off as unhinged and she's found guilty of a whole host of betrayals and screwups.

So we get a horror thriller whodunit helmed by an unreliable narrator. And it's a non-stop thriller from front to back with a cinematic climax worthy of the inevitable TV adaptation. It's smart, self-aware slasher fiction that gets a modern day, meta update without getting too bogged down in handwringing analysis. Fast and bloody with all the adrenaline of a classic drive-in horror movie. Another killer cut from Grady Hendrix.