First Fiction Fridays: Squarehead by Brian Davis

What:Squarehead (Insomniac Press, 2015)Who:Brian Davis is a graduate of Concordia University’s Creative Writing program whose work has appeared in The Smoking Jacket and The Barnstormer. He lives in London, Ontario where he cheers on the Habs.Why you need to read this now:This is a story for sports fans who know exactly what it feels like when life gets in the way of watching that really big game. This particular story is set in Montreal, the game is hockey, and it’s playoffs.We meet Corey, an Anglo-Canadian who doesn’t speak French, aka our titular “squarehead”, at a really low point in his life. Instead of watching the game, his girlfriend drags him to a poetry reading and then proceeds to break up with him when he says her poetry all sounds the same. She won’t even let him catch the replays, instead throwing him out of her apartment. Naked.But all Corey can think about is how he can watch the next game when he wasted a sick day on a post-breakup bender. After walking out on the job we follow Corey through a chain of events that brings to mind DeLillo’s Game Six and Linklater’s Slaker: weed, three day old clothes, random strangers, and because it’s set against the 2008 Bruins-Canadiens game 7 matchup, riots.While Corey is disenchanted with life in Montreal, and his inability to get his life together, the reader is shown a city like no other. Those who have been there will feel nostalgic over descriptions of neighbourhoods, hole-in-the-wall bars, and people, and those who’ve never been will come away with a sense of the contradictions that make it such an interesting city.Squarehead will bring you back to the days when responsibility was all but non-existent and not wearing underwear for three days was nbd. With fast pacing and a National-Lampoonesque humour, spending an afternoon with Squarehead is time well spent.