Buying Cigarettes for the Dog
by Stuart Ross
Freehand Books (2009), 200 pp.

Stuart Ross’s first book of short stories since 1997 is a daring collection. These twenty-three bizarre vignettes leap from the straightforward to theexperimental and back again. His fiction is often bold, sometimes infuriating, and always rewarding.

Ross is a documentarian of the absurd. “Me and the Pope” imagines the pontiff as an annoying house guest eager to rob a convenience store; in “Shooting the Poodle,” a man needs a bodyguard to protect him from his dog. There are sobering moments as well: “Elliott Goes to School” concerns a young man who takes sixty-three children hostage, while “Three Arms Less” explores the fallacy of war without coming off as preachy. An underlying anger courses through these stories; one senses Ross wants to shake the world by its collar and make it aware of its idiocy.

Economically written, the book is full of delightful flourishes: thin white legs become “ostriches pecking for food,” and fleas on a dog in Guatemala “re-enacted various Latin American revolutions.” Nonetheless, in some stories form trumps function, while others have quirky set-ups — “Cow Story” is about a bovine invasion, “Bouncing” centres on a man who cannot stop tumbling head over heels — that ultimately fail to pay off.

Through poetry boot camps, small-press book fairs, self-published chapbooks, and literary zines, Ross has fashioned a unique career in Canadian letters. He’s a tireless, and some would say shameless, self-promoter, and he bolsters his reputation with this book. Like the man himself, Buying Cigarettes for the Dog demands attention.

More book reviews: Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault