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An Off/Kilter-approved List of Halloween Reads
We’re kicking off a week of spooky reads with these hair-raising picks; all to get you in a scary mood come All Hallows’ Eve.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 21 results
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Arvida
$19.95Finalist for the 2015 Giller Prize
Finalist for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award
Like a Proust-obsessed Cormac McCarthy, Samuel Archibald’s portrait of his hometown is filled with innocent children and wild beasts, attempted murder and ritual mutilation, haunted houses and road trips to nowhere, bad men and mysterious women. Gothic, fantastical, and incandescent, filled with stories of everyday wonder and terror, longing and love, Arvida explores the line which separates memory from story, and heralds the arrival of an important new voice.
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Confidence
$19.95Nominated for the 2015 Giller Prize.
Nominated for the 2015 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
In Russell Smith?s darkly brilliant new collection of short stories Confidence, the reader will be introduced to ecstasy-taking PhD students; financial traders desperate for husbands; owners of failing sex stores; violent and unremovable tenants; aggressive raccoons; seedy massage parlours; experimental filmmakers who record every second of their day; wives who blog insults directed at their husbands. There are cheating husbands. There are private clubs, crowded restaurants, psychiatric wards. Every character has a secret of some kind.
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Home by the Sea
$19.95A car skids off a fog-covered road and rolls over. A woman emerges and helps her badly wounded husband out of the wrecked vehicle. Together they make their way down a narrow path which leads them to a large house near the sea, where are playing and friendly people welcome them inside. But things are not as they seem. Something evil, deadly lurks behind the door. Once you find yourself inside these walls, there may be no way to ever get out. Beware.
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How to Get Along With Women
$16.95Longlisted for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize
A sharply original debut collection, How To Get Along With Women showcases Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s keen eye and inventive voice. Infused with a close and present danger, these stories tighten the knot around power, identity, and sexuality, and draw the reader into the pivotal moments where-for better or for worse-we see ourselves for what we truly are.
“How to Get Along With Women is at once stunning and daring.”—Canada Arts Connect
“De Mariaffi’s writing is biting and captivating.”—The Book Stylist
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Light Lifting
$19.95Light Lifting
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Martin John
$19.95Finalist for the 2015 Giller Prize
Among The National Post’s Top 5 Books of 2015
Among The Toronto Star’s Top 5 Fiction Books of 2015
Among Largehearted Boy’s Favourite Novels of 2015
One of Quill & Quire’s Books of the Year, 2015
Among The Edmonton Journal’s Top 5 Books of 2015
A 49th Shelf Book of the Year, 2015
Among NOW Toronto’s Top 10 Books of 2015
Martin John’s mam says that she is glad he is done with it. But is Martin John done with it? He says he wants it to stop, his mother wants it to stop, we all want it to stop. But is it really what Martin John wants? He had it in his mind to do it and he did it. Harm was done when he did it. Harm would continue to be done. Who will stop Martin John? Will you stop him? Should she stop him?
From Anakana Schofield, the brilliant author of the bestselling Malarky, comes a darkly comic novel circuiting through the mind, motivations and preoccupations of a character many women have experienced but few have understood quite so well. The result confirms Schofield as one of the bravest and most innovative authors at work in English today.
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Meagre Tarmac, The
$19.95Meagre Tarmac, The
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Queer Little Nightmares
$18.95The fiction and poetry of Queer Little Nightmares reimagines monsters old and new through a queer lens, subverting the horror gaze to celebrate ideas and identities canonically feared in monster lit. Throughout history, monsters have appeared in popular culture as stand-ins for the non-conforming, the marginalized of society. Pushed into the shadows as objects of fear, revulsion, and hostility, these characters have long conjured fascination and self-identification in the LGBTQ+ community, and over time, monsters have become queer icons.
In Queer Little Nightmares, creatures of myth and folklore seek belonging and intimate connection, cryptids challenge their outcast status, and classic movie monsters explore the experience of coming into queerness. The characters in these stories and poems – the Minotaur camouflaged in a crowd of cosplayers, a pubescent werewolf, a Hindu revenant waiting to reunite with her lover, a tender-hearted kaiju, a lagoon creature aching for the swimmers above him, a ghost of Pride past – relish their new sparkle in the spotlight. Pushing against tropes that have historically been used to demonize, the queer creators of this collection instead ask: What does it mean to be (and to love) a monster?
Contributors include Amber Dawn, David Demchuk, Hiromi Goto, jaye simpson, Eddy Boudel Tan, Matthew J. Trafford, and Kai Cheng Thom.
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Silencing Rebecca
$18.95In this genre-bending debut YA novel combining elements of horror, magic realism, and realistic fiction, Rebecca Waldmann’s sheltered life as an Orthodox Jewish teen in Toronto is shattered when her father moves them to Edmonton, where she is plunged into the worldly life of a public high school.
Ordinary teenage angst is complicated by Rebecca’s lack of experience with a culture of wearing cool clothes, swearing, talking back to teachers, and other aspects of secular teen life. Things take a darker turn when Rebecca encounters antisemitism and discovers a secret about the long-ago death of her mother that her father has been hiding from her.
Rebecca doesn’t just defy the strictures of her ultraorthodox religion by wearing tight jeans and flirting with a non-Jewish boy. She discovers to her horror that she has undergone a change that makes puberty look easy—she’s been transformed into a golem! When this mythical clay creature from Jewish folklore takes her over, body and soul, she’s helpless to resist—or almost. Is it because she’s so furious with her father, is that why she is sometimes a girl with a cute boyfriend, and sometimes a very earthy, ugly monster?
In this new and very disturbing back-and-forth existence, Rebecca fights off the attention of a predatory schoolmate and her father’s determination to force her into an arranged marriage. She struggles to name her own desires and speak her own truths, and still be true to her own beliefs. But it’s hard to know your own beliefs when you are in a battle for your existence as a human… -
Solitaria
$19.95When Vito Santoro’s body is inadvertently unearthed by a demolition crew in Fregene, Italy, his siblings are thrown into turmoil, having been told by their sister Piera that Vito had fled to Argentina fifty years earlier after abandoning his wife and son. Piera, the self-proclaimed matriarch, locks herself in her room, refusing to speak to anyone but her Canadian nephew, David. Now scattered over three continents, the family members regroup in Italy to try to discover the truth.
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Stolen
$20.00Rowan Friesen has made a career of drug dealing and small-time thievery. He lives a loners life on the outer reaches of Saskatoon, selling cystal meth to highschoolers and hawking his pilfered loot on the net. Shiftless and seemingly friendless, he is, at first glance, an unlikely and unlikable protagonist.
But as Stolen unfolds, we learn the details of Rowans life: his well-meaning but self-absorbed mother, his mentally ill father, and a high school friendship both lustful and incendiary.
Praise for Stolen:
Lapointe constructs the familiar world, the one inside each of us, in the lives of strangers. Its what fiction does best. The Globe & Mail
It moves with the force of whats right and true and must not be elided. Giller Prize Jury
Giller Prize Nominee
Winner, Saskatchewan Book Awards
Best First Book (City of Saskatoon Book Award)
Globe & Mail Top 5 First Fiction -
Suture
$20.00To make her films, Eva must take out her eyes and use them as batteries. To make her art, Finn must cut open her chest and remove her lungs and heart. To write her novels, Grace must use her blood to power the word processor.
Suture shares three interweaving stories of artists tearing themselves open to make art. Each artist baffles their family, or harms their loved ones, with their necessary sacrifices. Eva’s wife worries about her mental health; Finn’s teenager follows in her footsteps, using forearm bones for drumsticks; Grace’s network constantly worries about the prolific writer’s penchant for self-harm, and the over-use of her vitals for art.
The result is a hyper-real exploration of the cruelties we commit and forgive in ourselves and others. Brewer brings a unique perspective to mental illness while exploring how support systems in relationships—spousal, parental, familial—can be both helpful and damaging.
This exciting debut novel is a highly original meditation on the fractures within us, and the importance of empathy as medicine and glue.
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Tear
$22.95WINNER OF THE 2023 KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE
A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2022
49TH SHELF EDITOR’S PICK FOR SEPTEMBER 2022
A reclamation of female rage and a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman.
Frances is quiet and reclusive, so much so that her upstairs roommates sometimes forget she exists. Isolated in the basement, and on the brink of graduating from university, Frances herself starts to question the realities of her own existence. She can’t remember there being a lock on the door at the top of the basement stairs—and yet, when she turns the knob, the door won’t open. She can’t tell the difference between her childhood memories, which bloom like flowers in the dark basement, and her dreams. Worse still, she can’t ignore the very real tapping sound now coming—insistently, violently—threatening to break through her bedroom wall.
With the thematic considerations of Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson’s work, and in the style of Herta Muller and Daisy Johnson, Tear is both a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman and a bristling reclamation of female rage. Blurring the real and the imagined, this lyric debut novel unflinchingly engages with contemporary feminist issues and explores the detrimental effects of false narratives, gaslighting, and manipulation on young women.
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The Death Scene Artist
$20.00M_____ is dying of cancer. Only thirty-two, an extra with a meagre list of credits to their name and afraid of being forgotten, M_____ starts recounting the strange, fantastic and ultimately tragic path of their love affair with the world’s greatest living “redshirt” – a man who has died or appeared dead in nearly eight hundred film and television roles.
In a compelling narrative of blog entries interspersed with film script excerpts, The Death Scene Artist immerses readers in a three-act surrealist exploration of the obsessive fault-finding of body dysmorphia and the dangerous desires of a man who has lived several hundred half-minute lives without having ever experienced his own.
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The Hush Sisters
$22.95***49TH SHELF UTTERLY FANTASTIC BOOK FOR FALL***
***NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS WINNER, SUSPENSE***
***NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS FINALIST, PARANORMAL***
Sissy and Ava Hush are estranged, middle-aged sisters with little in common beyond their upbringing in a peculiar manor in downtown St. John’s. With both parents now dead, the siblings must decide what to do with the old house they’ve inherited. Despite their individual loneliness, neither is willing to change or cede to the other’s intentions. As the sisters discover the house’s dark secrets, the spirits of the past awaken, and strange events envelop them. The Hush sisters must either face these sinister forces together or be forever ripped apart.
In The Hush Sisters, Gerard Collins weaves psychological suspense with elements of the fantastic to craft a contemporary urban gothic that will keep readers spellbound until the novel whispers its startling secrets.
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The Laws of the Skies
$19.95Winnie-the-Pooh meets The Blair Witch Project in this very grown-up tale of a camping trip gone horribly awry.
Twelve six-year-olds and their three adult chaperones head into the woods on a camping trip. None of them make it out alive. The Laws of the Skies tells the harrowing story of those days in the woods, of illness and accidents, and a murderous child.
Part fairy tale, part horror film, this macabre fable takes us through the minds of all the members of this doomed party, murderers and murdered alike.