October Publications

Canada is the backdrop for Karen Smythe's Stubborn Bones, a collection concerned primarily with love, loss and family. Many of her characters are, as one of them puts it, "a little bit, you know—off." In the title story, a woman tells her estranged husband about her friend Marta's love affair with Marta's recently deceased father's close friend; the longer "Strange Relations" examines the interactions of a family across three generations—mostly the secrets and betrayals, the disappointments and resentments. Smythe's apparent need to infuse the stories (especially the shorter ones) with Meaning can be tiresome, but her combination of elegance and empathy usually succeeds. (Polestar [9050 Shaughnessy St., Vancouver, BC V6P6E5], $12.95 paper 177p ISBN 1-55192-364-5)

Sarah Jane Smith's frustrating No Thanks and Other Stories revolves around a family home in Michigan and might best be described as northern gothic. The bitter, eccentric matriarch, Valerie, goes mad and commits suicide. Prospects for the house and all connected to it are grim, especially when Valerie's widower marries a shrew of a woman who becomes a constant source of annoyance for unstable daughter Clara. Smith does have talent, which is best exhibited in her descriptions of the natural world, but she also tends to overwrite, and readers will likely find it hard to penetrate the fragmented, almost hallucinatory narrative. (New Issues [Western Michigan Univ., Kalamazoo, MI 49008], $14 paper 201p ISBN 1-930974-10-8)

When Butterflies Kiss is a collaboration among 10 would-be writers, each of whom contributed a chapter. It concerns the jumbled erotic misadventures of a man named Dante, and the best thing that can be said about it is that none of the women is named Beatrice. This monster's Dr. Frankenstein is someone called Sékou. Along with Shange, another contributor who is also the publisher, he bears most of the responsibility for this hodgepodge of one-night stands, dreams and crude innuendo, all stitched together with clichés, sentence fragments, painful dialogue and mixed metaphors. (Silver Lion [931 Monroe Drive, Suite 102-319, Atlanta, GA 30308], $13.95 paper 212p ISBN 0-9677286-1-4)