Here is the best of Bill Gaston's stories since the publication of his Giller Prize nominated collection, Mount Appetite (2002). In this extraordinary work, Gaston crafts his fiction around the idea of the gargoyle -- the concrete representation of extremes of human emotions.

In Gaston's marvellous, riotous, Rabelaisian world, Gargoyles are physical manifestations of the disfigurements and contortions to which we human beings subject ourselves. Indeed, as Gaston wrote each story, he sketched out a distinct gargoyle to look down over it. For that reason, each story in this collection has a strange and unique guardian spirit whose sometimes benevolent, and sometimes malevolent, presence informs the characters and their actions. Gargoyles shows one of our best writers at the top of his form.

Bill Gaston grew up in Winnipeg, Toronto, and North Vancouver. After spending a dozen years in the Maritimes, he moved to Victoria in 1998 to teach writing at the University of Victoria. He has published a collection of poetry, several plays, three story collections, and three novels, with a fourth, The Good Body, due to appear in spring 2000. "Where It Comes From, Where It Goes" won the 1998 CBC/Saturday Night Canadian Literary Award for fiction and was published in Saturday Night in May 1999.

Bill Gaston's profile page

• Short-listed, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
• Winner, ReLit Awards - Short Stories
• Short-listed, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize
• Short-listed, Governor General's Literary Awards: Fiction

Funny, distressing, scary, deeply human.

Globe and Mail

...Gargoyles is an example of what short stories can and should achieve: a resilient compactness of prose that rely on nebulous but defined parameters for impact.

Pique News Magazine

Every word...is precise and perfect. He layers so much in 15 pages that, once you've finished a story, you feel as if you've absorbed a novels worth of thoughts and images.

Now Magazine

...vivid, unpredictable, and fascinating.

Toronto Star

As always, Gaston's social consciousness is leavened by humour - sometimes gut splitting, often wry, never dull. Close reading and re-reading reward: what eludes in dark water emerges bright and new.

Daily Gleaner

Canada has produced few writers as astonishingly original as Bill Gaston...Gargoyles never fails to entertain, enlighten and dazzle.

Globe and Mail

Whether his characters are twelve-year-old boys or eighty-year-old women, he gets into their skin and pulls us along with him. It is this looking-out from the eyes of someone else that is among Gaston's greatest accomplishments as a storyteller....Besides creating believable characters, Gaston is astonishingly fast at establishing the world each story is set in--an important skill considering how different each story's world is.

subTerrain

[A] compelling and highly original collection.

Quill & Quire