‘The Shadow over Portage and Main,’ ed. Keith Cadieux and Dustin Geeraert

Reviewed by André Forget

There is something inevitably tragic about an anthology. Walk into any used bookstore, and you will find them gathering dust in a poorly advertised corner, commiserating with each other about barely-remembered relevance. Who, when asked what their favourite book is, names an anthology? Whose heart beats fast at the thought of Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada? What collector digs greedily into their wallet at the sight of the Norton Anthology of British Literature, 3^rd Edition? Anthologies are sexless archives, shrines to canonical gods no longer worshipped, cenotaphs bearing witness to the aesthetic or ideological passions of yesteryear.

And yet there is something necessary about the anthology—something noble, even, in the way it bridges the gap between the crass generalism of the literary magazine and the more discerning specialization of the collection or novel. For many of us, our first introduction to serious prose was in the pages of an anthology, where Mavis Gallant and Sherman Alexie could rub shoulders with Ursula K. Le Guin and Charlotte Perkins-Gilman. But it is at the very moment the anthology works its introductory magic that its irrelevancy begins. Those who love Gallant will hunt down her Selected Stories; those who connect with Le Guin will move on to The Left Hand of Darkness. Anthologies are the Tinder of the literary world.

But among these thick-waisted agglomerations whose primary purpose is to initiate readers into the arcane mysteries of “canon,” there lurk a smaller and infinitely sadder subset of anthologies based around genre, geographical region, period, subject-position and any number of other organizational rubrics. Unless an editor is uncommonly lucky or preternaturally sensitive to the difference between zeitgeist and the merely faddish, such collections are doomed in short order to the rubbish-bin of history. They simply don’t contain much that will be of enduring interest. Witness the depressing march of a century’s worth of the Best American Short Stories: aside from grubby literary historians, who now cares about 2005, or 1982 or 1934? Such endeavours are as seasonal as a Tim Horton’s special products menu and serve much the same purpose.

But these are general objections, and I have been asked to write about a specific case: The Shadow over Portage and Main, an anthology of “Weird Fictions” edited by Keith Cadieux and Dustin Geeraert and published by Enfield & Wizenty earlier this year. As the title suggests, Shadow is both a regional and a genre-specific collection, bringing together a wide range of gothic and horror offerings from writers with strong Winnipeg connections. It is curious that Cadieux and Geeraert chose the title they did (if, indeed, the choice was theirs); to conjure such a geographically specific image is not only a misrepresentation of the book’s contents, which rarely and only in an offhanded manner address the city of Winnipeg, but also of its ethos. “The Shadow over Portage and Main,” with its definite article, suggests a unity of theme and content that is simply not present.

But in the preface, “There Is A Thing That Should Not Be, So We Must Be In Winnipeg,” Jonathan Ball suggests otherwise. Winnipeg, he tells us, is “a city without hope,” the “perfect place to die.” Because Winnipeg “dooms its artists to obscurity, to failure, before they have begun,” these artists have developed a preternatural purity; they never think to “water down their art to make it more marketable” for the simple reason that (supposedly) nobody buys books by Winnipeg writers anyway. In a breathtakingly hyperbolic coup, Ball ends by noting that “Since there is horror here, and since the horror cannot be stopped, since hope is gone and the world is a nightmare of chaos, we must be in Winnipeg”—bad news, presumably, for any recently arrived Syrian refugees.

Despite Ball’s melodramatics, I admit to becoming rather excited when I first read the preface: a short-story anthology that opens with a manifesto, no matter how overwrought, is a refreshing prospect. Unfortunately, while Ball insists that the city’s uniqueness creates a distinctive and unmistakable artistic sensibility, all the stories in The Shadow over Portage and Main manage is a gelatinous kind of coherence, in which the finer morsels congeal in a puddle of mediocrity.

Take the David Annandale story that opens the book, “Body Without Organs.” Not only bad in the sense that it festers with overwrought verbiage and necrotic clichés, the story is also just bad on a sentence level. Take the following representative samples:

“Something bumped inside his chest, and it was very close to pain.”

“He felt temptation but followed an instinct that knew better.”

“The air and light were slightly off kilter.”

“Even after all his care, one of the shadows was moving. It had no silhouette, but it held the potential for legion.”

All of these sentences abuse the English language in some way or another: in their vagueness, their grammatical confusion, their misplaced sense of the anthropomorphic. I can handle a well-written bad story, or a good story badly written, but one side of the equation really does need to be in order.

Of course, a bad story, in itself, is just a bad story. But in the kind of anthology that Cadieux and Geeraert have put together, where one is encouraged to read the stories as being part of the same project, a bad story inculcates in the reader a suspicion about all the stories that follow. As it happens, the next one—John Stintzi’s “Keep Your Pants On”—is a tight, unpretentious bit of horror that manages in seven pages to deliver a truly skin-crawling sense of dread. While not free of some awkward passages, “Keep Your Pants On” uses a standard horror trope (the casual hook-up) and makes it grotesque in new and interesting ways. The story works because Stintzi embraces the genre and doesn’t worry about explaining the bizarre turn it takes, which frees the reader to read things on a symbolic level. But I was too hung over from Annandale’s piece to approach it with clear eyes and an open mind—I only realized it was good in the last couple of pages.

At about the 100-page mark, it occurred to me that sitting at my desk surrounded by books might not be the best context in which to read such a collection. Genre fiction, I recall being told once, is ideal beach reading. Perhaps all I was missing was a stretch of sand, some filthy lake water and a few semi-nude eccentrics? I cycled down to Humber Bay and took my shoes off, to see if that would help. It didn’t. But I was furnished with an ideal metaphor when a large man began taunting his dog with a damp tree stump. He kept making as if to throw the stump into the water, which drove his dog into paroxysms of nervous anticipation. When he finally let fly, the stump plopped into the shoreline mud only a few feet past the water’s edge, and the dejected animal couldn’t even fit its jaws around it to haul it back to its master.

Reading The Shadow over Portage and Main, I felt very much like that dog. Every time a truly immersive story came along—Joanna Graham’s “Tapestries,” for example, or Elin Thordarson’s “Foxdream”—I began to feel like the anthology was finally starting to get some energy, only to be brought back down to earth by mundane, third-rate Lovecraft imitations like Jeremy Strong’s “The Weight of Thought,” or tedious Borges pastiches like Géza A.G. Reilly’s “Known Of Old And Long Familiar.” Stories like Graham’s and Thordarson’s work because they are actually weird: unpredictable stories, stories where the rejection of realist conventions serves a deeper, more profound purpose than simple titillation. It is difficult to write about them with any depth or specificity without betraying the element of surprise that makes them so endearing, but suffice it to say that Graham and Thordarson, in their own very different ways, use strangeness in a Brechtian way. Their overtly bizarre fictions remind us of the bizarreness of so much of what we accept as normal.

If I sound as though I’m being overly or unfairly negative, let me assure you that I do not consider Shadow to be much more horrible than the average anthology of contemporary literature. I suspect very few such collections contain more than a few really noteworthy pieces, and in Shadow‘s case the bad pieces are rarely so truly bad as to be memorable. My greatest criticism of the collection has less to do with the specific pieces than with the editing—or rather, its almost complete absence. From basic matters like trimming relative pronouns from non-restrictive clauses to more substantive issues like cutting redundancies, I found myself tempted to start line editing my copy to maintain my own peace of mind.

Cadieux and Geeraert both have stories in the collection (fairly good stories, I should add), and based on their biographies, writing seems to be where they invest most of their creative energies. They do not appear to be editors so much as compilers—which is confirmed in the editor’s acknowledgements section at the back of the book, which sheds some helpful light on how the collection came about. “The project began as a form of venting, where we would discuss horror literature over pints while the winter winds howled with hostility outside,” they explain. “As we gained participants, it became more like group therapy.”

There is quite a lot I could say about writers who take on editorial positions without bothering to develop editorial skills, but for the purposes of this review let me just say I would not be surprised to learn that there is little difference between the Word documents the editors received and the printed text. If I am wrong about this and extensive edits were undertaken, then I shudder to think of how the pieces must have read originally.

Having said all this, I should also say that I am glad this collection exists. Canadian literature (and more broadly, I think, literature in English North America) is undergoing a wonderful opening of the mind in regards to what was once rather snidely referred to as “genre.” This is as good for “literary fiction” as it is for the writers who were previously exiled to the margins. The best stories in Shadow (in my opinion, Graham’s “Tapestries,” Brock Peters’ “Like Faltering, Lisping Tongues,” Thordarson’s “Foxdream,” and Cadieux’s “Stuck”) bring the stylistic rigour of mainstream literary traditions into conversation with a decidedly non-realist sense of wonder, terror and play. I look forward to seeing what these writers go on to do in their own projects.

The afterword applauds the “growth of genre fiction on the Prairies and in Canada, in terms of both its presence and its range.” It is applause I share in offering. The Shadow over Portage and Main is a wonderful idea for a book, and someday I would like to read that book. In the meantime, there are treasures in this gothic prairie Wunderkammern that justify its purchase—I would just encourage the discerning reader to approach it the way we approach most anthologies, as a book read best when it is not read cover to cover.

Enfield & Wizenty | 224 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1-92785-536-2