Shortlisted for a 2021 ReLit Award
in the short fiction category!
Finalist for Trade
Fiction Book of the Year at the 2021 Alberta Book Publishing
Awards!
John O'Neill's gothic short stories, set
in the Canadian Rockies, are haunted by the violence inherent in nature and
humans. The mountains are majestic and impassive. The characters are
surprising, bent, but also empathetic. Their survival is tenuous. A two-sister
team of goth tour guides offers guided excursions up switchback mountain
trails; a paroled convict thumbs his way into the life of a family driving
west; and an animal pathologist, while performing a necropsy on a grizzly bear,
has an unusual encounter with both technology and
humanity.
Goth Girls of Banff is a superb collection, sharply written, with plot turns as consequence-laden as those on an iced-over mountain road.
