The Human Scale: Murder, Mischief and Other Selected Mayhems by Michael Lista

Be honest, the subtitle intrigues, right? Murder! Mischief! Mayhem! The adrenaline flows. O Canada! Turn the page. What’s next?! The base of humanity revealed. Is the teenage hacker a Russian spy? Can the algae king get away with knocking off his business partner? Why did the neurosurgeon murder his wife?

The Human Scale collects 10 true crime stories by poet, essayist, and award-winning journalist Michael Lista. The stories were previously published in Canadian magazines, such as Toronto Life and The Walrus. After each story, Lista provides a postscript describing his writing process and updates to the events described.

As such, what we have here is really two books in one. In the first, 10 tales of woe, slashing and shocking. In the second, Lista elucidates a thesis about the role of writing in bringing balance to a broken world:

“People, especially at either end of the human scale, at their most devastated or their most depraved, are too magnificent to write about any other way than beautifully—not because they’re good but because they are us.”

Bringing beauty to belligerence Lista does. He notes that “journalism, by its nature, is perishable,” but as a poet he knows that language can also be timeless. These are portraits of contemporary Canada that will last beyond news cycles. The reader will easily sense the pulse of Lista’s empathy—as well as his moral clarity. His reporting is clear, precise, lacking in sentimentality and melodrama, even as he’s lighting up the most gruesome of moments or connecting the dots of lapsed institutional ethics.

These are portraits of contemporary Canada that will last beyond news cycles. The reader will easily sense the pulse of Lista’s empathy—as well as his moral clarity.

The reader may also experience whiplash. Lista’s tales may resemble penny dreadfuls, but The Human Scale makes clear they are not entertainment. Orwell, Shakespeare, Keats, the Bible, Robert Caro, Norman Mailer, Janet Malcolm, Truman Capote: the citations are high level and frequent. Curiosity about what depravity your neighbours have been up to may have drawn you in and pulled you along, but the most consistent narrative in the collection is Lista’s postscripts, which are curious and complicated. They offer insight into his thinking and broad reading but also surprisingly intimate details about his life—“cigarettes, sex and Snoop Dogg, these being a few of my favourite things.” Yes, the hills are alive, and Lista wanders them, lamp in hand, trying to show us the way.

Michael Lista‘s reporting has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The Walrus and Toronto Life. He is the author of three books: the poetry volumes Bloom and The Scarborough, and Strike Anywhere, a collection of essays. He was the 2017 Margaret Laurence Fellow, a finalist for the Allan Slaight Prize for Journalism, and the winner of the 2020 National Magazine Award Gold Medals for both Investigative Reporting and Long Form Feature Writing. His story, The Sting, is being adapted into a television series for Apple TV+.

Publisher: Véhicule Press (April 30, 2024)
Paperback 8.5″ x 5.5″ | 240 pages
ISBN: 9781550656275

Michael Bryson

Michael Bryson has been reviewing books since the 1990s in publications such as The Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Paragraph Magazine, Id Magazine, and Quill & Quire. His short story collections include Thirteen Shades of Black and White (1999) and The Lizard and Other Stories (2009). His fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories and other anthologies. His story Survival is available as a Kindle single. From 1999-2018, he oversaw 78 issues of fiction, poetry, reviews, author interviews, essays, and other features at The Danforth Review. He lives in Scarborough, Ontario, and blogs at Art/Life: Scribblings.