Bad things happen. And they cause us to reinvent ourselves—though not always in the ways that we would want or choose. This utterly destabilizing and vital process is captured poetically in Halifax writer Kris Bertin’s debut collection of short fiction. The stories of Bad Things Happen explore typical themes—work, love, cash, sanity—in atypical ways. This impressive collection offers stunning and disorienting shifts between lucid naturalistic prose and occasional descents into surrealistic hallucination. The general mood veers between hope and despair but even at the best of times, the effect of Bertin’s atmospheric prose is eerie and unsettling.
“Bad Things Happen,” the title story, explores how it can feel to be stuck somewhere—geographically, metaphorically, psychologically—and the repercussions of either trying to break free, or choosing to remain. There are only two places to go in tiny fictional Onecdaconis, New Brunswick—Carnation Food and the Esso station, and they happen to be in the same building. Trying to escape their fate to one day work as waitresses at Carnation (the only job in town for women), teens Dee and Tan hang out in the Esso all day and flirt with the guy at the cash, Jason. Over the course of their banter, Jason claims to be a lot younger than his thirty-four years, while the girls—especially Tan—strive to appear older, if not always successfully:
She’d put on her sister’s clothes and big earrings and a ton of makeup. Her boobs were all jacked up in a push-up bra, but it wasn’t sexy looking. They just looked unnaturally swollen, like she was allergic to something.
The story begins as the girls are breaking into Jason’s filthy bachelor pad, and ends with Tan’s desperate decision to leave town and the revelation as to why Jason is lodged in stasis. In the first of the book’s many perfect, imagistic endings, the waitresses at Carnation Food shiver in their uniform skirts as they are questioned by the police.
The police are nowhere to be found in “The Narrow Passage” (which is excerpted in this issue of the Winnipeg Review)—though they probably should be. The Narrow Passage—alternately referred to as Kennedy Narrows, or the old township—is a dishevelled, rural in-between place, and home to the Cliftons, whose trash output is both voluminous and suggestive of dark and possibly criminal activities. Struggling to haul it all away are garbageman Gene and his younger sidekick Richard. Collecting refuse out in the country is both physically backbreaking and psychologically illuminating for the two men as Richard struggles to keep up with, and eventually supersedes the capacities of, his aging mentor.
Enumerating the contents of one of their truckloads, Bertin uses vivid description to illuminate the mood of disquiet:
And then there was the stranger stuff, what they didn’t expect to see. Items that peeked out from cantaloupe guts and coffee grinds and used tissues. The realness of a man’s blonde toupee, wet and gleaming from the contents of a nearby plastic bottle of chicken stock. An old scarecrow made of pantyhose and chicken wire, twisted up like a circus rubberman. A hundred or so tiny ceramic busts of Mozart, all identical, most of them still intact and smiling painted smiles. Dozens and dozens of smudged brass casings from spent ammunition all mixed in with heaping strings of red-and-brown animal entrails. Three deer heads, stinking and staring and missing an oval of skull where there had once been antlers.
Over the course of the plot, the depravity of the Clifton family is viscerally elucidated. In both the unfolding evolution of Gene and Richard’s male homosocial relations as well as the evocative revelations about the creepy Cliftons, Bertin recalls the best Stephen King.
Most of the stories consider in some way the deterministic impacts of work, class and cash in characters’ lives, perhaps most inventively in “Everywhere Money.” Chris Rose works in a clandestine call centre where the objective is to gain fraudulent access to credit cards and where all staff are paid in cash. As a result of the dirty work, Chris has more paper money than he knows what to do with:
Inside my clock. In the hollow base of my bedside lamp. In a Ziploc bag sunk to the bottom of the litter box. Taped between every single page of every single issue of Motocross magazine from 2006 to 2010.
It’s a job that is hard to leave in more ways than one—but eventually Chris figures out what to do with the overflowing cash and how to execute an exit strategy. For anyone who has ever had a source for “easy money” with some heavy ethical strings attached, this story will resonate.
After burnout from the call centre job, Chris heads home to his mother’s place in a subsequent story, the collection closer “Your #1 Killer.” Chris has been vague about his recent employment history, and his mom’s low-level anxiety about it mirrors the familial angst that forms a common thread across multiple stories in the collection. But when Chris emerges from a worrisome depressive slump and finds a new sense of purpose as an exterminator of assorted vermin, it’s a source of relief and happiness for them both. In this curious resolution, Bertin finds within perversity a welcome sense of hope—as in so many of the rich and strange stories in this unique and excellent debut collection.
Biblioasis | 208 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1771960540
‘Bad Things Happen’ by Kris Bertin
Book Reviews
Bad things happen. And they cause us to reinvent ourselves—though not always in the ways that we would want or choose. This utterly destabilizing and vital process is captured poetically in Halifax writer Kris Bertin’s debut collection of short fiction. The stories of Bad Things Happen explore typical themes—work, love, cash, sanity—in atypical ways. This impressive collection offers stunning and disorienting shifts between lucid naturalistic prose and occasional descents into surrealistic hallucination. The general mood veers between hope and despair but even at the best of times, the effect of Bertin’s atmospheric prose is eerie and unsettling.
“Bad Things Happen,” the title story, explores how it can feel to be stuck somewhere—geographically, metaphorically, psychologically—and the repercussions of either trying to break free, or choosing to remain. There are only two places to go in tiny fictional Onecdaconis, New Brunswick—Carnation Food and the Esso station, and they happen to be in the same building. Trying to escape their fate to one day work as waitresses at Carnation (the only job in town for women), teens Dee and Tan hang out in the Esso all day and flirt with the guy at the cash, Jason. Over the course of their banter, Jason claims to be a lot younger than his thirty-four years, while the girls—especially Tan—strive to appear older, if not always successfully:
She’d put on her sister’s clothes and big earrings and a ton of makeup. Her boobs were all jacked up in a push-up bra, but it wasn’t sexy looking. They just looked unnaturally swollen, like she was allergic to something.
The story begins as the girls are breaking into Jason’s filthy bachelor pad, and ends with Tan’s desperate decision to leave town and the revelation as to why Jason is lodged in stasis. In the first of the book’s many perfect, imagistic endings, the waitresses at Carnation Food shiver in their uniform skirts as they are questioned by the police.
The police are nowhere to be found in “The Narrow Passage” (which is excerpted in this issue of the Winnipeg Review)—though they probably should be. The Narrow Passage—alternately referred to as Kennedy Narrows, or the old township—is a dishevelled, rural in-between place, and home to the Cliftons, whose trash output is both voluminous and suggestive of dark and possibly criminal activities. Struggling to haul it all away are garbageman Gene and his younger sidekick Richard. Collecting refuse out in the country is both physically backbreaking and psychologically illuminating for the two men as Richard struggles to keep up with, and eventually supersedes the capacities of, his aging mentor.
Enumerating the contents of one of their truckloads, Bertin uses vivid description to illuminate the mood of disquiet:
And then there was the stranger stuff, what they didn’t expect to see. Items that peeked out from cantaloupe guts and coffee grinds and used tissues. The realness of a man’s blonde toupee, wet and gleaming from the contents of a nearby plastic bottle of chicken stock. An old scarecrow made of pantyhose and chicken wire, twisted up like a circus rubberman. A hundred or so tiny ceramic busts of Mozart, all identical, most of them still intact and smiling painted smiles. Dozens and dozens of smudged brass casings from spent ammunition all mixed in with heaping strings of red-and-brown animal entrails. Three deer heads, stinking and staring and missing an oval of skull where there had once been antlers.
Over the course of the plot, the depravity of the Clifton family is viscerally elucidated. In both the unfolding evolution of Gene and Richard’s male homosocial relations as well as the evocative revelations about the creepy Cliftons, Bertin recalls the best Stephen King.
Most of the stories consider in some way the deterministic impacts of work, class and cash in characters’ lives, perhaps most inventively in “Everywhere Money.” Chris Rose works in a clandestine call centre where the objective is to gain fraudulent access to credit cards and where all staff are paid in cash. As a result of the dirty work, Chris has more paper money than he knows what to do with:
Inside my clock. In the hollow base of my bedside lamp. In a Ziploc bag sunk to the bottom of the litter box. Taped between every single page of every single issue of Motocross magazine from 2006 to 2010.
It’s a job that is hard to leave in more ways than one—but eventually Chris figures out what to do with the overflowing cash and how to execute an exit strategy. For anyone who has ever had a source for “easy money” with some heavy ethical strings attached, this story will resonate.
After burnout from the call centre job, Chris heads home to his mother’s place in a subsequent story, the collection closer “Your #1 Killer.” Chris has been vague about his recent employment history, and his mom’s low-level anxiety about it mirrors the familial angst that forms a common thread across multiple stories in the collection. But when Chris emerges from a worrisome depressive slump and finds a new sense of purpose as an exterminator of assorted vermin, it’s a source of relief and happiness for them both. In this curious resolution, Bertin finds within perversity a welcome sense of hope—as in so many of the rich and strange stories in this unique and excellent debut collection.
Biblioasis | 208 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1771960540