John Vigna: South Country

Vigna Dept: Within the narrow purview he has chosen, Vigna showcases an aptly spare style and an impressive willingness to explore the fraught relationships of guys deeply flummoxed, or else defeated, by the wintery meanness of getting by in the valley, according to Globe and Mail. Opening with Travis insists that I have another drink, South Country tracks world-weary Billy s awful relations with women and flashes back on his sexual assault by a local sociopath. Gas Bar s Dwight, whose wife and children died in a car accident, crushes a beer can with his fist before starting another weekend of beer and bourbon and TV, hunkered down in his room, then another five-day shift with the same crew, the same twelve-hour days. Encountering a bedraggled young prostitute, he offers her money, fleeting companionship and advice. When she asks, And then what? his reply You do what anyone else does. You carry on provides only cold comfort and the eight stories of Bull Head , John Vigna s debut collection, are set in a place roughly equivalent to Fernie. Like the London-based Wilson, Vancouver resident Vigna s country-noir vision of rural existence emphasizes dire, violent bleakness. Here, apparently, opportunities are few and far between, happiness rarer than platinum and quickly lost and anesthetizing alcohol the widely swallowed poison of choice. Though there is less manly rifle-firing and macho posturing in Vigna s fictionalized Fernie, the town s misery level suggests a twin separated at birth from Wilson s Invermere. Vigna s lost souls have typically fallen into sad routines within a deep rut; climbing out isn t a sure bet. In Short Haul , overweight logging-truck driver Lonnie spends evenings drinking at a stripper bar with his buddy Ricky both men mistake bills stuffed into cleavage for intimacy while avoiding his wife s fists and a crumbled marriage. Drunk and self-loathing and needing to bolster his flagging masculinity, he eventually shoots a deer feeding in a parking lot. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.