Gift Guide Week: Erica McKeen’s Picks

Picks by Erica McKeen

The holidays are here, will soon be upon us. Time to be merry and bright—right? But what about the inevitable family argument at the dinner table, the cancelled flight home because of the snowstorm, the viral infection that knocks you off your feet? Someone you know is laughing, cackling at the thought of the chaos—and this All Lit Up Holiday Gift Guide is for them.

For the person who thrives on dark humour, who knows the meaning of the word Schadenfreude, who thinks sorrow and failure are as essential as they are unbearable, and who might be a little bored, maybe a little fed up, with this day-to-day thing we call reality, here are four books packed with perfectly offensive laughter, horrible tears, and a healthy dash of the absurd.

Bird Suit by Sydney Hegele (Invisible Publishing)

We’ve all been there. The town on the water with the boardwalk shops. The one with the chain-link fences, sticky corner store, stray cats, and dead-end roads. Maybe we grew up there. Maybe we grew up and got out of there, moved to the big city. Maybe when we go back it hardly feels like home.

In Bird Suit, we’ve stumbled back into that town. And the magic of Hegele’s writing is, from the very beginning, their ability to disrupt that anticipated feeling of unfamiliarity and separateness. The book is soaked in the sensation of coming home, a kind of curdling nostalgia that’s both tender and intense. Here lives twenty-one-year-old Georgia Jackson, a young woman stuck in Port Peter, her hometown, out of guilt for her lonely single mother. She soon becomes entangled with the Blooms, a strange, melancholic parish family who may or may not be connected to the bird women that live in the local lake. Call it dark myth, call it stark reality—however you choose to interpret this absurd text, Bird Suit will grab you by your memories and break your heart.

Anecdotes by Kathryn Mockler (Book*hug Press)

For that busy person on your list who might not have time for long-form fiction, Anecdotes is the perfect pick. Whip-smart and brutally funny, these bite-sized bits of poetry and prose blend flat-faced reportage with sardonic absurdism to dig into difficult contemporary topics: political apathy, climate disaster, sexual violence, and the stickiness of the female body. They also provide useful life advice, like how to invoke imaginary children in order to win an argument, how to find a good psychic after your cat runs away, or how to avoid being murdered at your job interview. Part of the surprise and delight of Mockler’s writing is that it resolutely defies genre. Short stories give way to autofiction, which in turn gives way to found poetry and a chain of scenes linked by their recurring protagonists, Past and Future: strange and poignant personifications. Equal parts blunt and rambling, abrasive and comically healing, Anecdotes peels back the gummy layers of reality, revelling in its ludicrous inner core.

Pet, Pet, Slap by Andrew Battershill (Coach House Books)

Failure is universal, right? Life is suffering, so the cynics say. The hero of Battershill’s novel, boxer ‘Pillow Fist’ Pete Wilson, would probably agree. Washed up and out of shape, Pillow suffers his way toward a be-all, end-all boxing match with golden boy Julio Solis. He spends his free time with his coke-addicted roommate, Sherlock Holmes; the strangest animals he can find at the zoo; and a persistent, darkening shade of existential dread. Pet, Pet, Slap is a surrealist paradox: Pillow’s bleary stumble toward his final shot at glory, both deluded and tragically self-aware, assures us that we aren’t the only ones making a mess of things, while also reminding us how hilarious it can be that someone is actually doing a lot worse. The perfect reader for this book is likely a boxer at heart: as Battershill writes, “[B]oxers love negativity. They want to see someone get beat ten times more than they want to see someone win.”

Kilworthy Tanner by Jean Marc Ah-Sen (Véhicule Press)

For the wild artist on your list, the wandering bandmate, the lawless poet, or perhaps the person who would like to experience such an existence vicariously through fiction, try Ah-Sen’s latest novel, Kilworthy Tanner. With a propulsive style reminiscent of Beatnik poetry—jazzy, jumping, bold—Ah-Sen introduces Jonno, a directionless musician and writer who falls for an older novelist: beautiful, manipulative, indecipherable Kilworthy Tanner. They soon begin to co-author works together, initiating a sexual-intellectual power struggle both ludicrous and intense. As the chaotic narrative unfolds, the characters walk a tight-rope balance between total self-fulfillment and total self-annihilation: do they love themselves or hate themselves? For that matter, do they love or hate each other? Certainly no one can be trusted, and no one expects to be. The book is also delightfully “meta”: speaking practically, Kilworthy Tanner is Ah-Sen’s novel, but it’s also Jonno’s self-disclosed revenge manuscript, littered with paradoxical assertions that become artful pokes at reality. As Kilworthy declares at the start of their tumultuous relationship, “None of this can be published.”

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Erica McKeen is a queer fiction writer and the author of two novels, Cicada Summer (2024) and Tear (2022), which won the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, was shortlisted for the ReLit Awards, and was chosen as a Globe and Mail best book. She lives in Vancouver, where she works as a teacher and librarian.

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Thanks to Erica McKeen for this Schadenfreude slate of Gift Guide Picks! A reminder that you can order any of these books through All Lit Up, or press the “Shop Local” button to discover them at your local independent bookstore.

Keep up with this year’s gift guide here, and stay tuned for picks from tomorrow’s recommender, Danila Botha.