Two's company, three's a crowd--and sometimes it's more than that.
In The Third Person, a collection of uncanny short stories by Emily Anglin, a sequence of tense professional and personal negotiations between two people is complicated when a third person arrives. Within these triangulated microworlds, disorienting gaps open up between words and reality: employees dissolve from job titles, neighbours overstep comfortable boundaries, voices distanced by space or time make their presence felt. Uneasiness builds among these separate but entangled lives.
Anglin's darkly humorous stories contemplate situations in which characters refashion themselves to fit a new competitive milieu. The Third Person reveals how people can become complicit in these milieus, even desire them, often while being led into the loneliness they can instil.
"Each of these stories feels like it could go in the direction of the weird and otherworldly, but then that ends up not being the point. The true source of the uncanny, The Third Person seems to say, isn’t the paranormal—it's other people." —The Globe and Mail
"Anglin's stories creep up on a reader, occupying mental space for quite some time after reading them. The concealed details continue to percolate and develop over time.” —Quill and Quire