The main action of Megan Gail Coles’ debut novel takes place in St. John’s, NFLD, on a single day—February 14, Valentine’s Day—as a blizzard threatens the city. The setting is a fashionable downtown restaurant called the Hazel, which caters to a varied clientele: politicians, snobbish business types, couples willing to splurge on a special-occasion dinner. The characters are restaurant staff and patrons, their relatives, friends and acquaintances.
The setting may seem commonplace, even familiar, and the characters—rich, poor and in between—ordinary, but there is nothing ordinary about Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club or the anguished tale it tells. The multi-faceted story revolves around a love triangle. Georgina (George) is the owner of the Hazel, her husband John the talented and charmingly manipulative chef, and Iris the browbeaten, emotionally vulnerable hostess. Iris and John are lovers. Other major characters are Damien, a server (who also works the front desk of a nearby hotel), who is nursing a hangover, and who witnesses things but because of his subservient position is nearly invisible. And Olive, a young woman, a friend of Iris, who has been subject to a harrowing act of sexual violence and as a result has withdrawn from those, like Iris, who care for her, and who observes what occurs from her position as an outsider. The affair between John and Iris drives much of the action, but by the time we meet these people, the web of lies and deceit has spread its pernicious influence so far and wide that everyone is caught up in it to varying degrees. Coles narrates her novel from multiple perspectives, allowing each character space to provide their own backstory and describe his or her own version of events leading up to a somewhat chaotic and near-tragic denouement.
‘Make no mistake, this is a powerful novel: uninhibited and uncompromising. It is without a doubt the product of fierce and probing intelligence.’
Make no mistake, this is a powerful novel: uninhibited and uncompromising. It is without a doubt the product of fierce and probing intelligence. Its morality is righteous and the truths it reveals unambiguous and unflattering to a society that protects the privileged and throws the vulnerable under the bus. It is dazzling in its complexity and formidable in its craft. What’s more, the story that Coles has fashioned is emotionally authentic and often heart-rending. The pain depicted in these pages is real. We feel it in our gut. However, the book is also dense and relentless; its tone of moral outrage hardly varies throughout. In the end, it presents a daunting challenge to the reader. The only way to experience what this book has to offer is total immersion: dive in and resist every temptation to come up for air until the last page.
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
House of Anansi Press
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It took a few chapters to get into it, but by the end I was in awe of this book. I thought it was brilliant.