Plot-wise, Skin House accounts for the narrator’s time-generally: mornings hungover and taking stock, and days at work with his best and seemingly only friend Gerry (a butcher as grizzled as his co-worker and a smidge more cynical) those are followed by evening hours at Zamboni’s, the town’s establishment for serious drinking.

And the jaded loser figure-hurt by life’s misfortunes-likewise registers as a type, rather than an individual whose psychological dimensions an author is seeking to explore in depth. Envisioning Skin House Two, he announces its basic premise: ‘It’ll be 31 flavours of fuck the fuck off.’ The gruff masculine posturing and overall jaded outlook are familiar from decades of tough-guy films and novels Blouin isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel here. I get the big things wrong.’Īn aspiring writer ( Skin House purports to be his own book), the narrator promises further meditations of the same. I just don’t give a shit’ ‘Life goes down, not up’ ‘If I were going to commit suicide I wouldn’t get it right. Inspired by Charles Bukowski and fuelled by a viewpoint that ranges from hopeless to not-entirely-hopeless, the narrator’s philosophizing anchors the novel’s 300 pages: ‘I’m a reasonable man about things. That doesn’t seem like a good thing, does it? Or maybe it’s all right.

I’m using an empty can of Beefaroni for an ashtray.

If Larue relates a coming-of-age tale whose central trajectory suggests a deepening struggle with addiction that is likely to lead to debt, criminality and premature death, Blouin’s novel-which includes such chapter titles as ‘Lowered Expectations’ and ‘Grinding Ahead Ever More Quickly Toward Our Own Demise’-dwells on two guys for whom any youthful potential has long ago been supplanted by the burden of unfulfilled potential, dead-end employment, cirrhotic livers, assorted wounds and scars, and thick-skinned attitudes acquired in tandem with dispiriting experiences.Ī grocery-store clerk with a ‘rye and vodka hobby’ in an unpromising one-bar, no-bus town located in central Quebec, the narrator of Blouin’s darkly comic novel is less at a crossroads than nearing the end of a long period of decline. Larue’s elder by some 23 years, Blouin writes in a distinctly jaded, if not outright cynical, register in Skin House. Pablo Strauss, The Dishwasher, Biblioasis, 2019īenders, bloodshot eyes, illicit temptations, impulse control issues, consequential bad decisions, intermittent pangs of remorse: the wintry, darkly atmospheric pages of Michael Blouin’s Skin House and Stéphane Larue’s The Dishwasher are awash in special blends of misery resulting from the accumulation of elements like these-or collisions among them. Michael Blouin, Skin House, Anvil Press, 2019

Le Plongeur by Stéphane Larue