Just a Howl - by Will Richter (Paperback)

About the Book

Set in the Canadian west and featuring an array of disparate characters -- from tow truck drivers to oil executives to cult leaders -- this darkly comic debut collection explores the loneliness, absurdity, and unexpected cruelties of modern life.

Book Synopsis

Finding humour in desolation and beauty in the absurd, this darkly comic story collection chronicles our struggle for control in an uncontrollable world.

An eruption of violence at a book reading. A doomed infatuation at the dawn of a plague. A married couple finding their carefully balanced lives as lighthouse keepers upended when they rescue a young woman from drowning. An oil executive spiralling into self-doubt as he is slowly swallowed by a snake.

Set in prepper cabins and dentist offices, ivory towers and backwoods cults, these and other stories tell of a Canadian west made new and strange. Equipped with a gallows humour and a keen sense of the loneliness, irrationality, and unexpected cruelties of modern life, Just a Howl explores the many ways the twenty-first century corrodes our every attempt to connect to one another, as all the while a backdrop of catastrophe -- personal, societal, and ecological -- tilts the comic into the tragic.

About the Author

Will Richter's writing has received the CBC Short Story Prize, was shortlisted for a Lush Triumphant Literary Award, and has appeared in journals such as the Alaska Quarterly Review, The Fiddlehead, subTerrain, The Threepenny Review, and Witness. Just a Howl is his debut story collection. Raised off the coast of British Columbia, Will now lives with his family in Vancouver.