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Description
Shortlisted for a 2021 ReLit Award in the short fiction category!
Finalist for Trade Fiction Book of the Year at the 2021 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
John O’Neill’s gothic short stories, set in the Canadian Rockies, are haunted by the violence inherent in nature and humans. The mountains are majestic and impassive. The characters are surprising, bent, but also empathetic. Their survival is tenuous. A two-sister team of goth tour guides offers guided excursions up switchback mountain trails; a paroled convict thumbs his way into the life of a family driving west; and an animal pathologist, while performing a necropsy on a grizzly bear, has an unusual encounter with both technology and humanity.
Goth Girls of Banff is a superb collection, sharply written, with plot turns as consequence-laden as those on an iced-over mountain road.
Awards
- Short-listed, ReLit Award for short fiction!
Editorial Reviews
"Like a moguls champ, O’Neill seamlessly glides over narrative twists and turns to deliver thrilling short stories of authentic mountain flavour."
~ AMA Insider Magazine
"The depth and variety of perspectives O'Neill writes make this collection a staggeringly endearing pastiche."
~ Courtney Eathorne, Booklist
"Whether looking for a story about the Rocky Mountains’ breathtaking (often literal) nature, or for some stories to pull on your heartstrings and teach you about what makes us human, O’Neill’s Goth Girls of Banff is a collection that has something for everyone."
~ Skylar Kay, FreeFall Magazine
"O'Neill is a skilled stylist. His use of language and image is vivid and crisp, the narratives are deeply imaginative and unpredictable."
~ Steven Ross Smith, Alberta Views
"The characters who populate this winning collection make the pilgrimage to Banff with expectations, usually of salvation. What they find is something distinctly less divine. Any hope of communion with nature is either thwarted by mundane human interference or the revelation of violence that lurks just below all that beauty.”
~ Zachary Abram, Canadian Literature
"If you’ve ever wanted to visit Banff, I suggest picking this book up. It will frighten you and inspire you and, in the end, you might just yearn for a slice of that adventure too."
~ Myshara Herbert-McMyn, The Ormsby Review
