‘Cretacea & Other Stories’ by Martin West

Reviewed by Carl Watts

“My Uncle Dale wasn’t an evil man, or even mean or bad looking. In fact, he wasn’t really my uncle at all.” So begins the opening story in two-time Journey Prize-nominee Martin West’s debut collection, Cretacea & Other Stories.

Another kicks off with the sentence “The last time I saw Trisha we were supposed to get together for some noose-play,” at which point some readers may recall Elif Batuman’s description in The Possessed of the contemporary glut of MFA-style short stories, their opening sentences “crammed with so many specificities, exceptions, subverted expectations and minor collisions that one half expected to learn they were acrostics, or had been written without using the letter e.” Throughout its eleven lean stories, Cretacea deals in many of the tropes that characterize the Acclaimed Short Story (regardless of the actual writing process of the mysterious West, whose bios usually list little more than his magazine publication credits). Cretacea is a first-rate study in these predictably impressive plot twists and turns of phrase. By the collection’s end, however, it seems also to have layered those conventions alongside others that for decades have characterized Canadian writing about the Badlands and Prairies.

The opener, “Not a Bad Man,” is rife with bizarre situations and kitschy atmospherics: Dale and his wife “listened to Charlie Parker nightly on their console at distorted volume and gave me long lectures about the sex lives of extinct Cretaceous animals.” Elsewhere, the prose verges on imagism, with a revolver described as an “ugly chunk of metal” that “sucked up the sunlight and just about anything else that came close.” West’s technique hits hardest when it’s combined with successive twists that add more than an element of surprise, such as when the narrator’s disorienting experience of boyhood violence gives way to the story’s final picture of damaged masculinity, Dale’s “rugged hands on my shoulder and those great grey eyes on my brow, begging so badly for something to be taken back or needing so desperately to give it all away.”

Surrealism seeps in frequently, as in the enigmatic “Daughter of the Dead Reeds” (the more recent of West’s two Journey Prize inclusions). The story’s central image morphs from a “small and childish” body, “the limbs knotted in reeds and the blonde hair strewn with petroleum,” to something with a skull tangled in cattle wire, “stretched into a wedge” and with “a string of brass bells” around the neck, to a creature with a six-foot wingspan, its eyes “baby blue,” its beak “triangular and the arms scaly, reptilian wings.” The narrator’s blunt statement that “This was long past reason” adds a compellingly baffling variant to the collection’s catalogue of back-country grotesqueries. At these moments West seems to be sifting through the detritus of MFA-fiction conventions and scattering his findings over the unfathomable swaths of sediment laid down by Badlands predecessors like Robert Kroetsch.

This technique pays off in the collection’s final stories, when the shock-value moments are smoothed out into a few relatively straightforward vignettes. “Gart’s Girl” includes both the book’s funniest moment (a desperate swinger replies to the ruminative statement “We move like drumlins, our species” with “Tell me about the drumlins… Tell me about how they moved, Gart”) and an instance of actual sympathy, with male violence rearing its head in support of human dignity rather than an effort to rob someone of it. The final story’s jarring yet diegetically conventional series of public outbursts begins with awkward remarks like “I’ve heard so much about you… About how at the ACLA meetings you two would go into the back room and give each other blow jobs.” It erupts into resigned descriptions of behaviour that is initially shocking and mortifying yet ultimately comprehensible and defensible in the context of mental illness: “Her face stretched into lava flows but her mouth was angular and sharp. I would not have recognized her except for the tattoo. She didn’t acknowledge my existence. She made a fist and yelled at the chandelier.” The story’s grinding-to-a-halt-in-slow-motion effect both matches its subject matter and provides a synthesis of the book’s consecutively fast-paced and ambling (as well as concurrently trendy and conventional) composition.  

These later pieces return to a few characters from previous stories, establishing some degree of connectedness without revealing so complete a narrative universe as to warrant comparisons with collections that verge on novels or are unified in some obviously cyclical sense. West gestures toward these patterns but seems unwilling to lodge his creations too comfortably within such recognizable architecture. Nevertheless, his glimpses of continuity and moments of rest are appealing given the constant stream of oddities and surprises at the collection’s beginning; they mark the book as a coherent, digestible longer work in spite of its author’s success in a genre where best-of anthologies read like unrelenting torrents of precocious yet distant narrators, synaesthesia, bodily contortions, kitsch objects, close attention to pronunciation and etymology, and predictably abrupt left turns.

Still, by the end, the book’s obsessions with fossils, guns, paranoid potheads, autoerotic asphyxiation, lonely male protagonists, and attractive female police officers become somewhat redundant (as do its constant reminders that we’re in the Badlands, which are located in a rural part of a conservative Prairie province called Alberta). The sum of these redundant surprises is a sometimes compelling, often enjoyable overlaying of the traditional and the fashionable. If West can find some way to compound these elements without retaining so many identifiable strata, he’ll really be onto something.

Anvil | 192 pages | $20.00 | paper | ISBN# 9781772140491