Waste

by Andrew F. Sullivan

Larkhill, Ontario. 1989. A city on the brink of utter economic collapse. On the brink of violence. Driving home one night, unlikely passengers Jamie Garrison and Moses Moon hit a lion at fifty miles an hour. Both men stumble away from the freak accident unharmed, but neither reports the bizarre incident.

Haunted by the dead lion, Moses storms through the frozen city with his pathetic crew of wannabe skinheads searching for his mentally unstable mother. Jamie struggles with raising his young daughter and working a dead-end job in a butcher shop, where a dead body shows up in the waste buckets out back. A warning of something worse to come.

Somewhere out there in the dark, a man is still looking for his lion. His name is Astor Crane, and he has never really understood forgiveness.

Genres: Fiction, Horror, Canada, Crime, Novels

256 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 15, 2016

About the author

Andrew F. Sullivan is from Oshawa, Ontario. He is the author of The Marigold, a novel about a city eating itself, and The Handyman Method, cowritten with Nick Cutter. Sullivan is also the author of the novel WASTE and the short story collection All We Want is Everything. Sullivan's fiction and criticism have appeared in places like the National Post, Hazlitt, The Globe & Mail, The New Quarterly, PRISM, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Longform, and other publications. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the way home from work late at night, Jamie and Moses hit a lion, nearly totaling Jamie's car. Moses comes home to find his mother missing and wanders the bleak Ontario town of Larkhill looking for her. Meanwhile, Jamie finds himself homeless and discovers a body in waste can at work...

Waste is one gritty read, the tale of two losers and their respective circles of friends in Larkhill, a dying city of filthy hotels and abandoned buildings. An undercurrent of hopelessness runs through it, making it seem like a much longer book than it is.

The dead lion turns out to be incidental, although it does bind the fates of co-workers Jamie and Moses. Jamie has a daughter with a former co-worker but little else. Moses has a circle of wannabe skinhead friends and a brain-damaged mother, former bowling champion Elvira. Throw in a couple brothers with ZZ Top beards and a power drill fetish, a drug dealer named The Lorax, and the lion's cancer-ridden owner, and Waste becomes a powerful stew of violence and despair.

The book jumps back and forth in time, showing Jamie and Moses as kids before returning to their present predicaments. Poor Connor Condom! The first half or so of the book moves really slowly and I contemplated shelving it. However, the second half was a page-turner and was almost strong enough to lift the book up to four stars.

This isn't a book with a lot of likable characters. Everyone seemed coated in blood and shit by the end. Jamie's boss was the only one that seemed like a good guy but he was probably hiding something hideous under his benign veneer, like virgin snow covering up a thousand carcasses.

Sullivan's writing was right on. I felt grimy reading part of this and he has a great eye for detail. I felt pretty tired by the end of the book.

Waste is one brutal read, part Donald Ray Pollock, part Trainspotting. Three out of five stars.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read 1/21/16 to 1/23/16
3 Stars - Recommended to readers who don't mind a slow start and time spent on secondary characters
Pages: 256
Publisher: Dzanc
Releases: March 2016



In his debut novel Waste, Andrew F Sullivan drags us down the dark and desolate streets of Larkhill, Ontario, where we meet Jamie, who was once a high school bully, and Moses, a half-hearted skinhead - two angsty dudes who live shit lives in a shit town working shit jobs. Moses hitches a ride home with Jamie one night and the two of them end up hitting, and killing, a lion on a back road. Rather than report the freak incident, they drag the body into the snow-covered ditch and take off into the night. What they don't know is that some men are looking for that lion, large men with long beards who carry power drills as torture devices, who take orders from a man who will stop at nothing to punish Jamie and Moses for what they've done.

After a pretty powerful opening, Sullivan seems content to back things up and takes his time introducing us to secondary characters. But stick with it. While it may appear unconnected at first, your patience will pay off after the groundwork's been laid out and you start following the trails of bread crumbs, each of which ultimately lead back to one of our original two bad boys, Jamie and Moses. From there, the book quickly becomes a page-turner as everything begins to converge.

This is a bleak book, you guys. Larkhill is home to a bunch of down-and-outers, extended-stay motelers, and drug king pins. Nothing good will come of these wasted lives and the entire town is about to go through some serious pain and suffering, all on account of Jamie and Moses and that goddamn gored-up lion.Yet something tells me they were damned from the get-go. Happy endings seem to have no place here.

The book doesn't release for another month and yet it's making all kinds of waves, already appearing on some Most Anticipated lists. Will it make yours?

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Disclosure: Andrew Sullivan and I are internet-friendly, but, to quote Nick Hornby, "I don't know him so well that I had to read his book, if you see what I mean.")

Waste is great, dark grit-lit, and it's no surprise that it's blurbed by Donald Ray Pollock and Craig Davidson: this is Canada's answer to Pollock's The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff. (Or, if you like, an ultra-dark version of the film Burn After Reading: there's that same sense of piled-up incompetence and people with their own agendas colliding. Logan's murdered father ending up in the bin at the slaughterhouse, to be discovered by an utterly bewildered and terrified Jamie; the fact that the lion is in the novel at all because of a hilariously stupid misunderstanding.) There's the same sense of depravity and despair--of families and situations as claustrophobic as coffins--only Sullivan's people live out their nightmares in a landscape more haunted by failed industries than failed mines. Everyone in Larkhill, Ontario is physically battered: teeth are broken into a jack o' lantern smile, tattoos are infect, boys are smothered with plastic bags while riding to school, skinheads shave their heads with safety razors and boil up with ingrown hairs. This could get numbing, but it doesn't, because despite it all, they're still moving, still acting, still getting into trouble. They're stumbling, mostly bewildered, through a nightmarish world, but while they may be trapped, they're not helpless.

The story begins when two butcher-shop employees--thirty-ish Jamie Garrison and teenaged Moses Moon--hit a lion while driving home one night. We've just come off a prologue with a man getting his kneecaps drilled in the middle of the woods, so it's almost a relief to find that Jamie and Moses know what kind of novel and world they live in: they immediately and correctly conclude that someone with a lion as a pet would be angry at losing it and finding it dead, and that anyone who could afford a lion as a pet is a bad enemy to have. They dispose of it as best they can, but it marks the intrusion into their lives of something both violent and glorious, and neither of them can shake it.

Moses especially can't, because he has no time to process it: his mother (of the head that survived the bowling ball blow) has gone missing. He rounds up two friends, both of whom have followed his lead in trying out skinhead hate as an alternative to going-nowhere despair, and the three of them make their way through a tangled set of violent set-pieces on the hunt for Elvira Moon. Jamie's quest is at first more banal--he just wants some painkillers--but it escalates in an unexpectedly hilarious fashion until he finds himself dealing with a dead body that has incidentally happened into his possession.

It sounds chaotic, and it is, but it works because it so accurately replicates the characters' own feelings of doing the best they can in situations they can't quite understand. The only real caution I would offer about the book is that that chaos gets replicated for the reader in style as well as plot, with situations that start in media res and then duck back for context, sometimes bobbing back and forth across hours and even years in the same section. I feel about this the way I feel about the ultra-clipped language in The Cold Six Thousand: I see the thematic relevance and I admire the art of it, but it still knocks me intermittently out of full immersion in the text.

The strengths here are the setting, the language, and the sense of very, very hard-won choices, and since I've already discussed the first and can't discuss the last without spoilers, I'll throw in a few excerpts.

Skill in description is common, and that appears here too, but even more than that, Sullivan has a gift for a kind of almost aphoristic clarity. For example, here's Moses on the appeal neo-Nazism has for him and his friends: "The boots were an investment for the future, for a friendship built on hates they couldn't name until they decided it was everything they were not." Or, faced with a friend's whose sanity has clearly slipped, looking for a knife: "In another's kitchen, Moses realized, you were always at their mercy." Jamie's old work friend--one of exactly two people in the novel to have their life together--advises him to deal with the monotony of the job by cultivating a distinctive rapport with one of the women on staff, just to give him "a bonsai tree," something to look forward to and maintain. The effect is a novel studded with just enough insight and emotion to let some hope in--that the characters are capable of understanding and regretting the things they've done and of maybe choosing differently next time.

Grim as this can get, that's some much-needed light, and for what it's worth, I finished reading this not with horror but with a sense of compassion.

[Christopher O'Halloran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unrelenting. Unapologetic. Grimy.

WASTE is all these things and more. A truly unique experience, this novel looks at the seedy world of 1989 Larkhill, Ontario. As a BC boy, I'm glad for the opportunity to finally experience the wonderful province that has spawned so many of my favourite Canadians, though I hope many of my friends skipped the neo-nazi phase of their youth.

The characters in WASTE are so well-developed, and to call them flawed would be dramatically understating things. They are all of them horrendous and interesting, everyone from the main cast to the bit players getting a chance to shine. You'll love to detest them.

When it comes to plot, WASTE jumps from scene to scene and set piece to set piece giving the reader whiplash as we follow a slowly unraveling group of scumbags. That whiplash is the perfect mirror to the emotions of Moses, Jamie, and friends. It feels almost like a Guy Richie film, winding around the city until we find ourselves in an untieable knot that can only be sliced through.

Be sure to keep an eye on Andrew F Sullivan. Anyone who reads WASTE can see that this man has a lot to say. I, for one, can't wait to listen.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This unusual and challenging debut novel, set in 1989 in fictional Larkhill, Ontario, has an urban-apocalypse, post-civilization vibe. It’s written as if its characters’ moral signposts have been obliterated by some cataclysmic event, and all that’s left to guide these people through their days are their immediate needs, urges and appetites. Andrew Sullivan begins his story with a scene of torture and murder, followed by a lethal encounter between a car and a lion on a road that runs through an industrial wasteland. After this, anything goes and pretty much does. The plot blends characteristics of two classic forms: the revenge tragedy and the quest, though sometimes it’s not entirely clear who’s seeking revenge against whom and why, and who is in quest of what exactly. To be fair, logic is more or less beside the point and absurdity abounds in these pages. The laughs, when they come, are of the horrified, dropped-jaw variety, usually in response to some intricately detailed scene of mayhem or dismemberment. Sullivan has peopled his fictional landscape with criminals, psychopaths, down-and-outers and lowlifes. With the sole exception of our hero-by-default Jamie Garrison—because he’s just about the only one left standing at the end—the characters are damaged, deformed, wounded, toothless, addled, addicted, obsessed, homicidal, suicidal, bigoted, stupid, unlucky, morally bankrupt, or some combination of the above. At least Jamie has a goal, which is to get through these catastrophic events in one piece (many of the characters don’t seem to even care about surviving). Not only does Waste not shy away from the vile and repugnant side of human nature, it revels in it. If there was ever a novel that the faint of heart should avoid, this is it. Andrew Sullivan’s literary impulse resides in the abandoned byways and shadowy backstreets of blighted America and takes inspiration from society’s dregs. The novel that he has written is gory and violent. It will turn the stomach of readers who prefer their fiction refined and polite. But anyone who toughs it out will agree that the story they have read is a powerful and unforgettable one narrated with verve and great confidence. Throughout the book, Sullivan stays true to his vision. The result of his efforts is noteworthy and quite possibly unique in Canadian literature.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wrote a review of WASTE at Alternating Current. This is a portion of said review:

Despite Waste’s lowbrow trappings, Sullivan has written a deeply moral tale. The plot is secondary. The A to B, above, is not what’s important. What is important is to consider every life in this book; every life spent, abused, trashed, and burned. This is not a farfetched book. It’s our world, with a slight bent to the sinister. These lives are possible—indeed, much of what Sullivan has written comes from records of actual events. And like real life, sometimes you don’t learn from events so much as you witness them. That’s what Sullivan has done here. He’s stood witness to people lost and forgotten, the dross of capitalism, the runoff of greed.

Waste asks of its reader what it asked of its author. See what happens in the everyday grinding of the gears of this world. Remember it. Be sickened. Just don’t be okay with it. In the early pages of the book, Moses is relaying the contents of a TV show to Jamie, on their way home from work. In puffed-up racist fashion, he describes a fire at a school for the mute, and a girl caught in said fire, “melts her whole mouth shut […]. Her skin burns […] like candle wax.” Jamie, sleepily aghast, says, “Moses, why? Why is this something you would tell me?” And Moses’ answer is, essentially, that things can always get worse.

The rest can be found here: http://alt-current.blogspot.com/2016/...

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This charming little tale set in 1989 Toronto will warm the cockles of your heart--just kidding. This is brutal, wildly inventive prose. The gore factor is very high with this novel, nonstop carnage. The mood is one of absolute desolation and hopelessness. Sullivan masterfully layers in detail and there are set pieces which employ brilliant pacing techniques that I definitely plan to appropriate for my own work. Just the kind of nihilistic novel I love to come across. Reminded me of Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel at times. Anyone who's ever spent a winter in a frozen industrial wasteland with deteriorating buildings and lives will identify with this novel. I expect to hear great things from Sullivan in the future. A devastating tour-de-force. I will definitely read his debut story collection now, ALL WE WANT IS EVERYTHING.

[Rusty · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author has stated in that the scenes of violence in the book are based on a lot of research, and one can imagine that he also received some knowledge of breaking and cutting bone and tissue during his time working at a meat plant. This shows.

The book takes place in the fictional city of Larkhill, Ontario. But so many have commented that this city is based on Sullivan's home town of Oshawa, Ontario, that he may as well have named the place Oshawa in the book. Larkhill is a wrecked town. Economically bereft, decayed not decaying. Sullivan does a very good job evoking a mood of perpetual doom and gloom. It is as though when the sky in Larkhill is not grey,it is raining a muddy rain. This is the mood. The characters feel doomed, even those who survive the novel's events.

A large cast is introduced. They are given enough character that they are not complete blanks when it is their turn to die, but none are very deeply developed. One of the main characters, Moses, is a skin-head. Another, Astor Crane, is a gangster. Both these groups are willing to deal out some pain and when put in opposition they do so with zeal. The gangster is meant as the menacing baddie. But to be the big fish in a small muddy pond like Larkhill is just sad, not threatening.

There isn't much story, and what is there does not seem particularly realistic. Jamie and Moses accidentally run over Crane's pet lion, and hide the body. He finds them. Violence ensues. The ending falls flat. Sullivan tried too hard for some resonant pathos in the final scenes and that messes up his conclusion.

This novel isn't an action story, despite the violence. What we see is brutal death but it isn't action writing. Neither is this a thriller. There is too much universal gloom for that. It isn't realist. It isn't nihilist. Nihilism is the belief that life is meaningless, that nothing in the world has real existence. That isn't quite what is portrayed here.

I think most accurately Waste is existentialist. All three male leads, Moses, Jamie, and Astor, must create their 'self', then live in accordance with this self. Their choices lead to existential angst, in which they experience negative feeling arising from their choices, and every choice creates dread. The dread in fact is a constant theme. The novel could be seen as a metaphor for dread and decay.

The author's strengths are creation of mood and an ability to depict violence. I would like to see him use these skills in a gritty, more realistic novel, or a suspense-thriller.

[Chris Roberts · Rating 1 out of 5]

Trek Canadian icy way
where the frenzied moon
begins to draw the light
away from the tundra
a fantastical phenomena
playing out with incredible speed
silver rays of light are retracted skyward
as if being jerked by an unseen spring
joined in ascent to form great
iridescent shafts, slamming into the moon
with devastating ferocity and it seems
that the moon will be pushed from the night sky
into another cosmos, never to orbit the earth again
but, she holds her ground and burns a bright
platinum heat that causes the eyes to burn.

Chris Roberts

[Steven Buechler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sullivan weaves a great mise-en-scene with this book by going from descriptions to thoughts/conversations of one of the characters. In taking one’s time in reading the book, we get a feel of a general situation and understand why the characters are pushed into doing what they do. We are forced to ponder each situation and reflect on it later on. The language is simple and frank at times but that adds to the colourful story.

http://tinyurl.com/hv9mqoq

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite being about Northern neighbors, captures the very specific emptiness and doomedness of abandoned Rust Belt industrial towns in a way that precious few novels dare attempt (goes up in the canon with Kathe Koja's The Cipher). There is no opportunity, no escape, no path out for the men trapped in the pit of the city- there is only shitty jobs that destroy your body, sleeping in a hovel for the rest of your days, precious few women around to distract from the loneliness and rage and disenfranchisement they experience. Waste is a dark novel, heads smashed in by the bottom of boots and bowling balls, lips melting in flames like wax on a candle, a trail of dead and broken bodies strewn across town, but it never feels unearned, the circumstances and desperation and thwarted masculinity all leading here. The plot of the novel, as much as it can be described, is bumbling, a collection of misunderstandings and mistakes leading only to more pain, more suffering, more rot in Larkhill. This is what happens when industry leaves a town, the jobs and the money flowing out, leaving teens to turn to neo-Nazism in search of any sort of meaning or purpose, a past to connect to, and the adults to turn to the opioids for the wounds they can't get the proper care for.

The closing image- a child gasping for air, trapped trying to take his own jacket off, a crowd of onlookers watching, sitting there, doing nothing, just taking in the spectacle of self destruction- feels apt for the novel, and the cities like Larkhill themselves in relation to the wealthy countries they reside in.

[kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Larkhill, Ontario, 1989. Late at night two teenage friends, Jamie and Moses, hit a lion crossing a darkened back country road. They throw the carcass in a ditch and make a promise to tell no one about it. Moses goes back to the hotel where he lives with his eccentric mother and discovers she is missing and begins to look for her. Meanwhile at his job in a butcher shop, Jamie discovers a decomposing body in a can of bone waste. All the while this is going on, there's a pair of sadistic, bearded ZZ Top looking brothers who love to kill people with power tools, searching for the person who killed their pet lion, Falcor.

Overall, this book is a very dark tale about the goings-on in a small Canadian town. From the first to the last page it never lets up in its bleakness--dirty hotels, filthy jobs, abandoned buildings. Everyone in this book is some version of a loser, stumbling through their wasted lives as addicts, dealers, wannabe skinheads, or just assholes in general. There's a healthy dose of black humor that breaks the emptiness every now and then, but the bleakness drags this book on much longer than it should. The first quarter moves moderately fast, but the middle was a snooze fest. I considered DNF'ing but wanted to get to the end, which was pretty decent. For a book that's so keen on violence, the only acceptable end is a violent one. "Waste" certainly delivers that.

Three out of five stars. Read if you're into Donald Ray Pollock or Irvine Welsh-type stuff.

[Stuart · Rating 3 out of 5]

good god above is this book bleak! It’s about violence, and poverty, and anger, and the all-encompassing presence of cruelty. It is catastrophic in its devastation. It just felt like one gutpunch after another.

None of the above is a bad thing! but good gravy be prepared. I requested this from my library after reading Sullivan’s new release THE MARIGOLD and enjoying his writing a lot. Here, too, is his prose sharp-edged and hammer-blunt. He is incredibly powerful with the crafting of a situation and a sentence to just devastate you, and this book does it over and over. And over. No stone is left unturned if he could hurt someone with it instead.

This really sits at about 3.5 for me, but I rounded down because I just lost the plot (and it sits so low in the first place due to subjective interest, not objective critique). That’s not necessarily Sullivan’s fault, as my reading routine has been struggling independent of reading this book, but I got to the climactic chapter and couldn’t quite put all the pieces together the way it felt like I should have been able to. The plot ending wasn’t satisfying but that seems appropriate to the themes of the book. The final image is goshdang haunting.

Shelved as queer because there are queer characters, but this is not a book that explores queerness.

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jesus this is the bleakest thing I've ever read. Set in a fictional Oshawa in the late eighties, it follows a bunch of wrecks of white trash people as they muddle through their wasted lives in a wasted city with violence and gore and black, black comedy.

It's a deep-dive into the wreck of the industrial suburb. Bad things just continually happen, awful coincidences bring people together, and it ends badly for most. It's a helluva microcosm to throw on the page and I can't say it's a particularly pleasant read, but it's very effective at what it's going for which is to convince you of the hopelessness that suffocates a town once it's forgotten by the economy and society in general.

Sullivan is a very talented writer, which makes the continued assault on light and good at least somewhat bearable. Though it also makes the grotesquerie that much more effective.

I don't think I've ever read anything quite like this. It's short on descriptions of the young, white, male protagonists, giving them them that everyman, faceless thing. Its story is discombobulated and only fits together at the end in, what else, a bloodbath. It's just unrelenting and hard and unique and I don't really want to reread it but I'm glad I got through it nonetheless.

[Josée Leon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was quite something. It it noir fiction set in a city in Ontario facing economic struggles.

A group of young friends, including wannabe skinheads seem to have lost their way and get involved in a chain of mishaps and violence.

The novel is very bleak and the characters all unlikeable. Even though the story is very slow-paced, it has very dark and intense moments. Lots of trigger warnings here, including animal cruelty.

I also found the book quite bizarre, both in its content and its writing style. Some characters get randomly introduced and you figure out later who they are. The writing also melds past and present, often from one sentence to the next.

I almost gave up on it because I wasn't getting on with the writing style. It did have some very nice passages and the bizareness made for an interesting read so that made me push on.

I think this book would work well for the right reader.

[riley · Rating 4 out of 5]

unbelievably dark. i thought i knew what i was getting into after the first chapter, but i was very wrong. the story is second tier to the characters, because that's what the majority of this book is: character studies on these fucked up people in this fucked up town. even the side characters get chapters in their own povs, which is confusing at times and brilliant at others. i really enjoyed this, but parts made me feel sick while i was reading, because there isn't even the smallest sliver of good in any of these people or their actions. would recommend for people who don't mind nonlinear, wandering stories.

[Wendy Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible writing ! Story was interwoven, deep, quirky, dark, disturbing, sad. A bit too many characters and oddities but the writing style and detail still held the book together. I wish the message would have ended more uplifting but in ‘Larkhill Ontario’ it might not be possible.

[Ben Shakey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably the most violent piece of CanLit ever!

[daine · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely fantastic book. definitely deserves a spot on the shelf

[Cathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

did not click with me on first read through

[Kat · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 stars

Fucked up

[Vanessa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whoa. Too bleak even for me! I really wanted to like it coz he’s 🇨🇦 and I liked an interview with him I heard.

[meghan ᓚᘏᗢ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5

Not bad but not great. Positions a very specific fictional Oshawa, which can be problematic. But definitely not the Oshawa I know and love lol.

[Alexander Kosoris · Rating 3 out of 5]

A story like Waste gets me a bit excited and at least a little bit sad, because I find myself tickled pink whenever an author can be as unflinching in their description of some very savage moments as Anakana Schofield or perhaps even Patrick deWitt as Sullivan is here. If an author can continually live up to the expectations cultivated from such strong writing, we are left with something that lingers with us, something that leaves an impression for some time to come, something that we may very well love. However, if our journey to such heights proves fleeting, the fall to the valleys is simply more hard-felt, proving to lessen the work in our eyes, even if it’s not necessarily bad in any significant way.

And Waste doesn’t have any immediate, obvious flaws. Upon finishing, I found myself a bit puzzled, because it had some great scenes that really struck me, but I found myself somehow unimpressed. The story seems mainly to be about how isolation breeds damage and instability, and the fact that I can be a bit wishy-washy with this assessment, that Sullivan is successfully ambiguous with the goals of his work, makes me quite happy. In the backwoods of the fictitious Larkhill, ON, in the late ’80s, Moses and Jamie try to move on with their lives after hitting a lion with Jamie’s car, but things keep spiralling out of control. Moses’ mentally unstable mother goes missing, Jamie uncovers a body behind the butcher shop where he works, and two dangerous men are intent on making them pay for what they did to their boss’ pet.

I think the real issue at hand with Waste has to do with the ups and downs, the peaks and valleys. We start off with a bang, but the author puts the brakes on. He takes time to explore the terrible things the people of Larkhill went through to get them to their desperate and hateful places, exhibiting some careful characterization when he does so, but also making things drag a bit in the process. While this on its own never proves to be a deal breaker, I found parts of the story wholly unsatisfying, including the big confrontation at the end. Nonetheless, when the writing’s at its best, Sullivan hits an uncomfortable, gritty intensity that makes for a fabulous read.

And this is why I struggled so much to really scare out my opinions on Waste. While nothing about Sullivan’s story is truly terrible, significant portions feel lacking. But, when it gets good, it’s really great.

[PGC Books]

Set in an economically ravaged small town Larkhill, Ontario in 1989, Waste, the debut novel by Toronto author Andrew F. Sullivan, begins with a hapless small-time drug dealer bleeding out in the snow—his meaningless death propelling readers headlong into a story of violence and bleak absurdity.

Moses, a wannabe skinhead, finds himself searching for his missing and outsized mother, a brain-damaged bowling champion. Jamie, a former high school bully is trying, at last, to do something, anything, right—if only he knew what that meant. But after a back-road car accident kills a stray lion, Moses and Jamie find themselves dragged into the violent orbit of a pair of roaming, sadistic brothers, and a mean, cancer-ridden gangster holed up in the penthouse of a local hotel, who may or may not be hallucinating—just don’t ask him about The Wizard of Oz.

Breathtakingly violent, Waste blurs the lines between crime fiction, noir, and literary horror. It is bloody, scuzzy, and leaves a gritty aftertaste of authenticity and dark humour.

One of the Toronto Star’s five up-and-coming writers to watch in 2016, Andrew has a great eye for incidental detail and a wicked turn of phrase. Larkhill, Sullivan’s fictionalized Oshawa, may be populated by vicious, stupid, losers but the writing never descends into caricature or cliché.

Andrew’s collection of short stories, All We Want is Everything (published by Winnipeg small press ARP Books), was among the Globe and Mail's Best Books of 2013, and Waste is surely one of this season’s best Canadian novels. Mark Medley, the Globe and Mail’s Books Editor, included Waste on his list of the ‘most anticipated (Canadian) books of the (first half of the) year,’ and the novel was featured in the Spring 2016 fiction previews of both the Quill and Quire and 49th Shelf. Foreword Reviews gave Waste five stars, and LitReactor described it as “an insightful gut-punch to the soul for any reader tough enough to take it.” The more sober Kirkus Reviews cautioned readers that “to enter Sullivan's first novel is to spend quality time with some of the worst people in the world.”

Recommended for readers of Craig Davidson (Cataract City), Mike Christie (If I Fall, If I Die), and Donald Ray Pollock (Knockemstiff), and fans of Blood Simple, Fargo, FUBAR, and Breaking Bad, Waste is set to become a bare-knuckled Canadian cult classic.

Dan Wagstaff, Marketing and Publicity Manager

[Dimitrios Otis · Rating 1 out of 5]

While I like the author's grounding of his novel in non-rationalized behaviours and no moral contexts--the characters just do what they do because that's what they do in that situation--the execution of it has some serious problems.

One of them is the fact that the novel reads like an entry in the scriptwriting/movie genre that arose post-Tarantino: characters living on the criminal edge constantly engaging in pop-culture discussions, while the plot gets laid out in overtly ironic absurdities. This might make the novel appealing to younger people immersed more in cinematic worlds, but for me it was simply a big signal that this novel is NOT literary, or even literature of a genre type. Its more of a screenplay with too much description.

As part of this, the violence is often simply gross and unpleasant, taking the novel out of cultural context into crude gore-movie sensibility. Why? If you want to write a gore-novel, then do so--but don't entertain the delusion you are also inherently probing dimensions of humanity. In fact you are limiting it, unless like Hubert Selby Jr. you have a real vision behind your violence.

More problematic is the author's way-overdone contextual referencing of the various sub-cultural settings and low-class milieu the white trash characters exist in. It can't just be an old car in a driveway--it has to be such and such a year and make, it has to be rusted out, it has to be on blocks...all of these descriptors doled out progressively and relentlessly in a way I found tiresome if not exhausting. I mean, virtually every scenario and paragraph has this relentless contextualizing. Have a little more faith your reader can get your drift--and that you the writer can illustrate something without constant iteration!

I would have liked to have the author's 'amoral' writing motivation work as a counterpoint to Selby's explorations into degradation, which are founded in Christian "original sin" and "Fall" story arcs. Unfortunately the 'flat line' of Sullivan's world just doesn't come through with something more--or even less. Perhaps he just tried too hard.

But evidently this writer completed Waste as an MA thesis in the esteemed U of T Creative Writing program, so perhaps he was sadly misled by his advisor, Miriam Toews, promoting alternate versions of her forays into "the ugliness of this world" to help entrench her status in that mini-genre.

[Brien Piechos · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this because I absolutely loved Sullivan's short story collection "All We Want is Everything." I tend to read through the existing reviews before adding my on. Below there's a lengthy one star making all the same points I was going to make, but with a negative twist where I saw positives. I enjoy that the novel reads like a "screenplay," because it has the narrative complexity of modern premium TV dramas-multiple plot lines of equal strength converging in an explosive and fulfilling climax, no digressive gristle that often masquerades as "literary," and is story-centric. That makes for a quick read. Others have compared this to Donald Ray Pollock but I honestly felt like I was readying a grittier, Canadian "Fargo." It's a crime story avoiding the cliches of robbery and guns, making it all the more unique. Some readers seem triggered by Sullivan's choice to make the gang of misguided youth neo-Nazi skinheads. But he doesn't explore the neo-Nazi skinhead culture, because that's not what the book is about. There is no exploration of ideology or politics. It's about a few misguided, marginalized teens stuck in a broken down town with no future who get caught up in a dicey situation that spirals out of control. He described Ian Stuart's voice as "screaming." I mean come on, Ian Stuart was a crooner. Waste's strongest element is the setting and scenery. I was reminded of winters in northern Indiana in the early to mid 1990's when I was a young punk rocker. You found yourself in unsafe situations with rough characters, often in danger and committing questionable acts in the name of nothing more than adventure and a lack of a better option and a place to stay. The characters are thusly sympathetic, and very much of the world Sullivan hoped to evoke. I knew kids like this. Some are dead, others in prison. Waste is a story of survival, and because this is an unflinching look an era others choose to incorrectly romanticize, not everyone survives.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing in this book! The title is a single word, but it has a lot of meanings in this work - wasted lives, wasted potential, literal waste, being wasted, getting wasted. And that sense that one is waste, living on the fringes, contributing nothing, trying desperately to figure things out, find one's place and sense of self and just... not doing it. This is a tough book to love, because the figures in it are so unloveable, the things they do are so atrocious - I often found myself shaking my head "no, no!" on the subway, a hand over my mouth in horror - but the writing is so devastating I just wanted to keep going.

[Dessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this novel was going to be whimsical. It was not, in fact, whimsical. In fact, it was very dark: the citizens of small-town Ontario finding new ways of hating one another, of spitting venom at the world in general, in tearing apart themselves and their families by force, by a series of ever-evolving and ever-novel forces. The reader sees potential and goodness glimmering in almost every character, way down at the bottom of the well. But ultimately that potential never comes to anything - and we return to the title of the book in a refrain of mourning: what a waste, what a waste, what a waste.

[Shelley V. · Rating 1 out of 5]

There are one in ten million skinhead types in the book, and it's all like the writer has been watching too much popular news and American film. He's reminds of Roth at his most melodramatic, like in "The Human Stain," and that book's awful ending, or Scott Fitzgerald's junk. I left this book unfinished after sixty pages.

I always have high expectations in Canadian fiction because I think no Canadian writer has been canonised. Sullivan's not going to be the first.