Canadian Noir

Noir has never been a genre so much as a tone, an overlay, a mood, and this anthology resists the temptation to define what is meant by noir – the editors were much more interested in what it meant to Canadian writers. In New Canadian Noir the full spectrum of the noir esthetic is explored: from its hard-boiled home in crime fiction to its grim forays into horror, fantasy, and surrealism; from the dystopian shadows it casts in science fiction to the mixture of desire and corruption it brings to erotica; from the blood-spattered romance of the frontier to the stark nihilism of literary realism. Cities like Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Halifax and Calgary provide location – with regions like Nunavut and the Okanagan Valley as natural settings – for stories like those of an elderly widow who ekes out a living collecting detritus while seeking to avenge the murder of her friend; a love-weary security guard who clashes with bounty hunters; an ursine meth-cooker who faces even stranger creatures on the frozen tundra of Nunavut; and a private detective who unravels a bizarre mystery in a town where the dead walk while the living despair.

Contributors: Corey Redekop, Joel Thomas Hynes, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Chadwick Ginther, Michael Mirolla, Simon Strantzas, Steve Vernon, Kevin Cockle, Colleen Anderson, Shane Simmons, Laird Long, Dale L. Sproule, Alex C. Renwick, Ada Hoffmann, Keith Cadieux, Michael S. Chong, Rich Larson, Kelly Robson, Edward McDermott, Hermine Robinson, David Menear, Patrick Fleming.

Claude Lalumière is the editor of 12 anthologies, and the author of Objects of Worship, The Door to Lost Pages, and Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes. David Nickle is an award-winning author and journalist, his most recent book the story collection Knife Fight and Other Struggles.