Coup de Coeur: Recent spec-fic reads by Lulu Vidal
500 words, ~2 minutes reading time
Issue 8, Summer 2025
Valentine in Montreal by Heather O’Neill with illustrations by Arizona O’Neill, HarperCollins Canada, 2025
An author's note at the beginning of Heather O'Neill's new book marks its unusual (to contemporary audiences) origins as a weekly column in the Montreal Gazette.
Each section, named after a métro stop, stands on its own, the stops and starts unlike the narrative flow of a contemporary novel. But the story, complete with illustrations by O'Neill's daughter Arizona, is utterly charming in a way that suits its unusual format. It’s easy to fall in love with Valentine, a penniless orphaned young woman who, after spotting her doppelganger, falls into the underground world of gangsters, art, and secret family all while dashing around Montreal's métro.
The book reads like a charming love note not just to O'Neill's home city but also to Montreal’s public transportation system and its bizarre mix of efficiency and art.
Other Worlds by André Alexis, McClelland & Stewart, 2025
André Alexis' latest, Other Worlds, is a book of short stories that brings glimpses of the uncanny into a world filled with the mundane. Perhaps a bit unusually for a single author collection, there are recurring family dynamics serving as a backdrop for many of these stories (the adult lawyer son of a philandering immigrant doctor father are characters that occur repeatedly) but Alexis' writing is so fresh, the careful wry tone of his work so measured, and the unusual circumstances that his characters find themselves in so jarring, that the repetition feels comfortable, especially in worlds where horses talk, the dead come alive, and entire towns hibernate in flesh cocoons.
Though I sometimes find short story collections uneven, almost every story in Other Worlds is such a delightful treat that it’s hard to pick favourites.
Glass Stories by Ivy Grimes, Grimscribe Press, 2024
When we talk about modern stories having the feel of fairytales we often mean very different things. In the case of Grimes’ writing it is the sense of dream-logic that unfolds in the narratives (or lack thereof). The beginning of the tale and the end are often as far away from each other as they can be, ghosts appear and disappear with little explanation and violence appears with brutal regularity.
True to its title Glass Stories is made of 17 stories, each title beginning with the word Glass. Sometimes the titular glass object bears very little weight to the narrative, sometimes it is the singular focus of the story.
The stories are eerie, surreal and wonderful in a way that yes, has the feel of a fairy tale. My favourite was perhaps Glass Coffin which takes place in an underexplained, but not undefined, future in which subcultures like “golf grandpa” thrive. But Grimes also features a series of more traditional fairy like stories: Glass Mountain, where a princess waits for a rescuer to come and marry her, and Glass Pet, a modern take on Little Red Riding Hood, are poignant and touching.
