Stoop City

by Kristyn Dunnion

WINNER OF THE 2021 RELIT AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION A sea witch, a bossy Virgin Mary, and a lesbian widow’s wife―in ghost form―walk into a short story collection ... Welcome to Stoop City, where your neighbours include a condo-destroying cat, a teen queen beset by Catholic guilt, and an emergency clinic staffed entirely by lovelorn skeptics. Couples counseling with Marzana, her girlfriend's ghost, might not be enough to resolve past indiscretions; our heroine could need a death goddess ritual or two. Plus, Hoofy’s not sure if his missing scam-artist boyfriend was picked up by the cops, or by that pretty blonde, their last mark. When Jan takes a room at Plague House, her first year of university takes an unexpected turn―into anarcho-politics and direct action, gender studies and late-night shenanigans with Saffy, her captivating yet cagey housemate.

From the lovelorn Mary Louise, who struggles with butch bachelorhood, to rural teens finding―and found by―adult sexualities, to Grimm’s “The Golden Goose” rendered as a jazz dance spectacle, Kristyn Dunnion’s freewheeling collection fosters a radical revisioning of community. Dunnion goes wherever there’s a story to tell―and then, out of whispers and shouts, echoes and snippets, gritty realism and speculative fiction, illuminates the delicate strands that hold us all together.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Canada, Queer

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

Kristyn Dunnion's academic pedigree is matched only by her punk credentials. She studied English and Theatre at McGill and holds a Masters in English. She's also the bass player for a dykemetal band called Heavy Filth and is known to host burlesque parties and drag king shows.

She currently lives in Toronto.

Reviews

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd forgotten how much I liked Kristyn Dunnion's writing. This is a great collection of short stories, mostly realist but a few with a speculative edge. All the characters are outcasts or misfits of some sort. A young homeless guy whose boyfriend disappears after their latest con. A rockabilly butch nurse whose longterm partner has left her. A street sex worker sharing the tricks of her trade. An elderly woman living with schizophrenia. Amazing grasp of character and punchy, visceral writing. It's incredible to see the range of different characters Dunnion disappears into, especially in the span of a short story.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost everyone in Stoop City, Kristyn Dunnion’s pulsating collection of short fiction, is approaching a crisis of one sort or another: a crossroads where a reckoning is imminent or life-altering decisions are looming. Dunnion’s characters tend to be misfits and rebels: people on society’s fringe struggling against communal norms, people who have given up trying to fit in because they know they don’t and never will. Still, they see what others have and yearn to experience that same love, that same sense of belonging. In “Now is the Time to Light Fires,” the grieving narrator is convinced her dead lesbian lover, Marzana, has returned and is trying to make up for past bad behaviour and win back her love. In “How We Learn to Lie,” cynical, materialistic Julia, a real estate agent, is all business: wearily accommodating her recently widowed client’s bereavement as she sets about the task of preparing the client’s condominium for presentation and sale. Then, true to form, when her own love life suddenly crumbles, Julia responds not with tears, but with decisive action and steely resolve. Teenage Ohio, in “Daughter of Cups,” is just starting to awaken to the fact that there is more to life than what goes on in the boring, ramshackle lakeside town where she and her distracted mother make their home. Confused by feelings for an older teen named Kevin Moody, who ignores her, and craving affection, she gives regular hand jobs to a biker: the only adult in her sphere who seems to take any interest in her. And “Tracker and Flow” is the taut story of a young professional couple, Kelly and Tom, whose latest failed attempt at in vitro fertilization sparks a disastrous series of events that ends in the collapse of their life together. Some of the stories are loosely connected—gay teen Pauly, a subordinate character in “Light Fires,” turns up in “Adorno To Devoto” playing the tragic lead—lending the collection dramatic as well as thematic unity. But as engaging as they are, these are not stories for the faint of heart. Dunnion’s characters are deeply flawed, sometimes misguided, often morally compromised, and battling a variety of physical and psychological demons. They are unsure of themselves and their place in a world that seems to offer only menace and censure. But when they declare themselves and try to assert their independence, they leave themselves alarmingly vulnerable. Only Jimmy, in the collection’s final two pieces, acts as if he is at home in his own skin, but this level of comfort comes at a steep price. Kristyn Dunnion is a sharply observant chronicler of the marginal urban experience. In these tightly written stories, nobody gets a break. Even her well-adjusted characters are stretched to the limit by challenging circumstances. What comes through loud and clear though is the author’s empathy for people whose lives are spinning out of control through no fault of their own.

[Sybil Lamb · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone who has ever played the straight-man to an angel alien or ghost.

[Dan MacDonald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short stories - mostly snapshot of life in Toronto. Cats and head rats, addiction, mental illness - surviving life and enduring it. Relationships - the people that take care of us and the people we are drawn to, that we need even though they might not do our bodies or minds any good. Great for coffee shop reading, one story at a time. I enjoyed.

[Andrea C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dunnion's short stories are gripping character studies. The dense urban and gritty township settings are not just additional characters in the stories, but are woven into the plot and people in a way that is unique and striking. The prose is rich yet easy to hold onto. I want to hug her characters.

A must read for Canadians.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 2 out of 5]

It has an excellent, in-your-face writing style...but it's deployed in aid of characters and stories that either put me off or left me cold. Just one of those books for which I'm not a receptive audience.

[Shana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the language and characters in this book so much. The bits of magic realism are so unexpected and yet relatable and hilarious. This would be a great read for a book group.

[Laura Sousa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Characters come to life through Kristyn's words, exposing raw emotions, hardships and triumphs. Not my usual genre to read, but so captivating.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

These dark stories somehow manage to despair and be hopeful at the same time. Beautiful writing.

[Catherine]

Some of the stories were interesting enough. I just put the book down in favour of something else after a few stories and never got back into it.

[Avi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up by chance at work and enjoyed so much more than I expected to. I loved the prose in this book so much. I 🩷 reading about normal people

[Lucian Childs · Rating 5 out of 5]

One way to tell a story is at a distance—third person, past tense, for example. That remove sounds authorial and gives the narration the ability to observe, to opine. But in most of the stories in this collection, Kystyn Dunnion is, like, screw that shit! I’m writing about real people, crawling up inside their brains to show, not just a story, but a particular, and often peculiar, worldview.

In some ways, the book reads like a report from the street. You have your teenaged gay drug-addicted hustlers, your undergraduate budding eco-terrorists, a person living with mental illness whose possession by demonic shoes leads to a fatal encounter and the drugged-out entourage of mourners after. They talk like they fucking walk. You got a problem with that, go read Henry James!

For all my retreats into narrative distance, I love voice in fiction. In my novella-in-progress I have girls—an eight and a twelve year old—teenage boys, all of them talking smack in the slang of the period. So, you’d be right to guess, that I love “Stoop City.”

I admit, it can sometimes be like Chinese water torture, all this crazy and/or drug-addled patter, but it feels fresh. And, under all the characters’ stylistic bravado, you feel their beating hearts. Hoofy, the young, gay street kid in “Fits Ritual,” who runs a scam with the love of his life, a boy who is as transactional as he is beautiful. Later, the nurse in “Four Letter Word for ‘Loose’” who tries to keep Hoofy from overdosing. Or in the devastatingly beautiful “Tracker and Flow,” the couple afflicted by another sort of possession, one reflective of their disintegrating relationship.

Kristyn Dunnion, is a Toronto-based performance artist and many of these pieces have the kind of verbal bravura you find in performance art or slam. Through voice, Dunnion takes you into worlds strange, frightening and beautiful. I, for one, am very happy to have gone along for the ride. { Cross-posted at my website. }

View all my reviews