![]() ![]() ![]() That doesn’t seem like a good thing, does it? Or maybe it’s all right. I’m using an empty can of Beefaroni for an ashtray. ![]() If Larue relates a coming-of-age tale whose central trajectory suggests a deepening struggle with addiction that is likely to lead to debt, criminality and premature death, Blouin’s novel-which includes such chapter titles as ‘Lowered Expectations’ and ‘Grinding Ahead Ever More Quickly Toward Our Own Demise’-dwells on two guys for whom any youthful potential has long ago been supplanted by the burden of unfulfilled potential, dead-end employment, cirrhotic livers, assorted wounds and scars, and thick-skinned attitudes acquired in tandem with dispiriting experiences.Ī grocery-store clerk with a ‘rye and vodka hobby’ in an unpromising one-bar, no-bus town located in central Quebec, the narrator of Blouin’s darkly comic novel is less at a crossroads than nearing the end of a long period of decline. Larue’s elder by some 23 years, Blouin writes in a distinctly jaded, if not outright cynical, register in Skin House. ![]() Pablo Strauss, The Dishwasher, Biblioasis, 2019īenders, bloodshot eyes, illicit temptations, impulse control issues, consequential bad decisions, intermittent pangs of remorse: the wintry, darkly atmospheric pages of Michael Blouin’s Skin House and Stéphane Larue’s The Dishwasher are awash in special blends of misery resulting from the accumulation of elements like these-or collisions among them. Michael Blouin, Skin House, Anvil Press, 2019 ![]()
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