Coup de Coeur: Recent Canadian spec-fic reads by Lulu Vidal
400 words, ~2 minutes reading time
Issue 7 (Spring 2025)
Ordinary Wonder Tales by Emily Urquhart, Biblioasis, 2022
Ordinary Wonder Tales begins with a haunting and only gets wonderfully stranger from there. In a series of ten essays, folklorist Emily Urquhart mixes reportage and retellings of fairy tales and legends with personal experiences ranging from ghostly encounters, to deaths and near-deaths.
Despite the fantastical elements woven into these essays, Urquhart comes across as remarkably level-headed. Stressing repeatedly that the job of a folklorist isn’t to test the veracity of those repeating myths, legends, and tales, but simply to record them.
The book may be nonfiction but it encourages the reader to look at their own lives with fresh eyes and see how it might become a paired down tale in a children’s fairy book. Ordinary Wonder Tales was shortlisted for the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
Northern Nights ed. Michael Kelly, Undertow, 2024
The first night after reading through some of these stories I promptly had an unending, cinematic, nightmare. What higher praise is there to offer for a horror anthology? Made up of over 20 tales from authors across Canada, Northern Nights features writers at the top of their game offering their eerie, spookiest best.
With so much talent on offer it’s hard to pick favourites but, as with most anthologies, there’s something for every reader. Black Fox by David Demchuk, is a fairy tale involving the titular animal who haunts the narrator, comes to an eerie gruesome conclusion. Camilla Grudova’s The Fragments of an Earlier World is a neo-Gothic tale of a family in Canada, whose lives are upended by the arrival of mysterious Scottish cousins is full of gore and body parts in a deliciously off-putting and shocking way. Another standout was Nathaniel Rich’s creepy monster-in-the shadows tale which will leave readers in doubt of the narrator’s sanity.
Bird Suit by Sydney Hegele, Invisible Press, 2024
Though it’s set in the fictional town of Port Peter there’s much that feels familiar, and very Canadian, about Hegele’s debut novel. Though less than 300 pages, Bird Suit spans multiple decades in the lives of two intersecting families who meet, and clash, in spectacular and devastating ways in a small harbour town in the early 2000s. Hegele’s prose is captivating and strong, but it’s the smalltown lore she convincingly builds which makes the book such a knockout.Woven through with nostalgia and longing for a small town that never was, Bird Suit is a surprisingly loving look at the dark past.