In the Quiet After Slaughter
- Publisher
- Libros Libertad
- Initial publish date
- May 2008
- Category
- Literary
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780980897975
- Publish Date
- May 2008
- List Price
- $14.95
Add it to your shelf
Where to buy it
Description
They chuck bean balls in the Mexican League, join a tour group to the Orient or serve time in a Prairie prison. They nurse divorce wounds on a Caribbean isle, search for a runaway, cultivate a grow-op in the basement. The characters populating Don McLellan's debut fiction collection–young and old, male and female, from the 1940s to the present–have all passed through East Vancouver's Renfrew Heights, a housing project for returning Second World War veterans. Though their circumstances are diverse and their fates disparate, each learns that wherever one wanders in this world, the baggage that never gets lost is where one comes from.
About the author
Don McLellan has worked as a journalist in Canada, South Korea and Hong Kong, and his journalism has been featured in countless publications including Vancouver Magazine, Equity, and V. He has had short stories published in Descant, Joyland, the Dalhousie Review, and more, and his debut story collection In the Quiet After Slaughter (Libros Libertad) was a 2009 ReLit Award finalist. He currently edits a trade magazine in Vancouver.
Excerpt: In the Quiet After Slaughter (by (author) Don McLellan)
From the Prologue
At the conclusion of the Second World War, Canadian combatants returning from Europe exacerbated an already-chronic housing shortage. In Vancouver, veterans and their families were billeted in downtown hotels. Hallways served as playgrounds, lobbies as nurseries. Indignant returnees halted traffic with their chagrin, prompting authorities to borrow an untested solution from the United States: public housing. In a single summer a forested hillside on the city's eastern periphery was cleared and the first of hundreds of look-alike bungalows constructed. The newspaper ran a photo of a bulldozer felling the first sacrificial tree. Demand for the rental units outstripped supply, so the coveted homes were let to those who'd endured considerable frontline action. Successful candidates were also required to have at least two children, encouraging action amongst hopeful applicants of a more welcome sort. An appropriate moniker for the residential development suggested itself nine months hence: Diaper Hill. Streets were named after memorable battle sites from both world wars, villages such as Normandy, Vimy, Dieppe, Anzio, Mons. Each narrow corridor had several homes fitted with a wheelchair ramp extending to the sidewalk – at least to where the sidewalks were meant to be. (Homes tenanted by the shell-shocked, of which there were many, featured no telling characteristic.) Until financing for paving was secured, rainfall turned roadway and footpath into muddy fjords. Postal workers refused delivery, a slight later avenged by a parliament of snappy canines. By the new millennium few of the bungalows or their original inhabitants stood erect. Folks began referring to the development as Widows' Hill. To many who live there these days, the Renfrew Heights Housing Project for War Veterans, where many of the following fictions are set, is remembered, if at all, as a quaint municipal curiosity. To original residents, however, the Project was more than a home. This modest neighbourhood was a sanctuary, a place to reassemble war-weary lives in the quiet years after slaughter.
