Coup de Coeur: Recent spec-fic reads by Lulu Vidal
500 words, ~2 minutes reading time
Issue 10 (Spring 2026)
The Words of Dr. L & Other Stories by Karen E. Bender, Counterpoint, 2025
Karen E. Bender is a seasoned short story writer and The Words of Dr. L represents her first foray into the speculative. The collection is a mix of straight literary fiction and speculative stories but Bender’s work shines brightest when she dips her toe into strange other worlds. Her speculative stories are the most openly political. The titular story "The Words of Dr. L", finds a young pregnant woman in a world in which abortion is illegal, searching for an abortionist who is able to cause a miscarriage with only a few words. In the "Shame Exchange" people paralyzed with shame have it extracted and donate it to the sociopathic politicians running rampant over their lives. Bender’s worlds are amusing, dark, and filled with possibility.
We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine by Deni Ellis Béchard, House of Anansi, 2025
Béchard’s hypnotic latest novel seamlessly blends together politics and technology in a family drama set in a near tomorrow. In an all too plausible techno-future distressed humans are at the mercy of a benevolent, yet indifferent, AI whose sole purpose is to keep them unharmed. Acting as a sort of quasi-therapist the AI allows its inhabitants to replay and at times alter, their pasts with the hope that, at some point, repetition will lead to acceptance, healing, or neutrality. Told from multiple points of view Béchard’s dark vision includes an American civil war and a societal regression driven by climate change. It’s not immediately obvious how each plot ties together, but the narrative threads combine to reveal a family saga that is surprising, heartbreaking, but with well-earned revelations.
Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis, Coach House, 2025
It’s been ten years since Fifteen Dogs was published. After winning or being nominated for just about every major Canadian literary award, André Alexis catapulted into CanLit stardom. The book has been transformed into a play, with plans for a future film adaptation, and now, to mark the anniversary of the book Coach House, the publisher of Alexis' entire Quincunx cycle, has released a beautiful hardcover special edition, with all books purchased in independent bookstores bearing Alexis signature.
The book edition is noteworthy in itself, with an embossed cover, sewn signature binding, Coach House’s trademarked milled paper, a new forward by American poet Eileen Myles and an afterward essay by Alexis in which he lists literary and real-life inspirations behind what would become his most famous novel. But all that glitter surrounds what is still a moving and triumphant novel. Told over 160-ish pages, Alexis contemplates the life of fifteen Torontonian dogs who are gifted (or cursed depending on your point of view) with intelligence by capricious gods who make them the subject of a drunken bet. What these dogs then do with this intelligence is frustrating, heartbreaking, and thought provoking. And though Alexis remains committed to honouring his dog characters as dogs, with all the strange and incomprehensible behaviour that entails, his work remains as ever a reflection on human behaviour and our various approaches to life.
