Book Club 2025: Sunday’s Child by Edward O. Phillips

I haven’t heard of this author before, but I like the “misadventure” on the cover…

I rarely talk about plot, because talking about plot is boring, but I guess I have to this time: I thought this would be a mystery, but instead it’s about a guy who kills a hustler (in self defence) and then decides to hack the body up for easy dispersal (instead of going to the police). That’s a quite well-used plot, but the story then either goes into gross/slapstick humour mode, or horror/thriller mode.

This one does neither — I mean, this is meant to be a humorous book, but it’s quite level headed. So what you end up with is a book about a stone cold fifty year old rather psycho gay lawyer who you’re supposed to identify with (and it’s written by a fifty year old gay lawyer, to boot), and it’s just kinda… eh?

But the main problem is the writing. The book is Canadian — and from 1981, so you wouldn’t think there’d problems much with vocabulary. I mean, I read books that are twice as old with some regularity… But, let’s take a paragraph almost at random:

I mean, sure, “aureole”. But “halo” would be more common. And… corfam? It’s not that this is much of a problem, but it’s rather unexpected. I don’t know whether this is because of the Canadianness of the book, or just because Phillips is an oddball, but…

Oh, “corfam” was out of date already when this book was written:

DuPont ended making Corfam in 1971, leaving it with only seven years of production.

WHAT?!

Oh, a Prince Albert is a type of coat…

Er… I don’t think anybody in 1980 was wearing a coat like this, really. The more I read, the more I think Phillips is just a font of malapropisms — he’s obviously trying to class up his writing, and is just overshooting badly, and landing in a Field Of Nonsense.

This was apparently Phillip’s first novel — at the age of 49, so perhaps he had a lot of vocabulary saved up for a rainy day, and now that it’s here, he’s gonna use it, by gum.

I kept reading in stupefied fascination. Much of the text is taken up by flashbacks to previous breakups and old marriages and stuff, and I wonder whether this was the impetus for the novel rather than then lacklustre dismemberment plot? It’s as if he thought those parts would be too boring to publish (extremely true), so he added some murders…

Horrifyingly bad book:

His first novel, Sunday’s Child, was published in 1981, and was shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award.

It had to have been a commercial success, too — there are three sequels. Man, people were starved for gay novels back then, eh? But here’s the most-liked review on Goodreads:

Indeed.

Sunday’s Child (1981) by Edward O. Phillips (buy new, buy used, 3.56 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: Forage Like A Bear by Chris Fink

This is a small book illustrated by John Porcellino — and I think that’s how I ended up with this?

All the texts in this book are structured like this — they’re a page and a half, and then there’s an illustration by Porcellino.

And it works — it’s a very pleasant read indeed.

It turns out that these texts were originally written for Northern Public Radio, and when I read that I was like “aaah”. Because these are very radio-appropriate lil texts.

Forage Like A Bear (2025) by Chris Fink (buy new, 4.59 on Goodreads)

Random Comics

Here’s some comics I’ve read over the last week. Or rather… that I attempted to read — I bounced on *counts on fingers* four of these seven books, which is, like, a lot for me.

I’ve never heard of these creators before — Pierre Jean Bichose and Zimmermann — but this album apparently won some kind of prize (for the writing)? Anyway, I picked it up dirt cheap in a used bookstore.

And I have to say that I quite enjoyed it. The linework is somewhat basic, but the page designs, the colouring and the storytelling really work.

It’s about a gang of terrorists that destroy various artworks in museums (no, it’s not new — late 80s), and it manages to jam a very satisfying story down into the standard 44 pages allotted to French(ey) comics. I mean, it’s not a masterpiece or anything, but it’s a surprisingly good trifle.

I shouldn’t have read it in one sitting, though — my brain starts shutting down after reading French for more than half an hour, so the last third of this book is rather hazy to me…

I read The Tomb of Dracula when I was, like, twelve? And I remember really enjoying it. And I’ve seen some people calling it the best comic book of the 70s.

And I still enjoy Gene Colan’s artwork — it’s really moody and appropriate.

But I was just really bored by the stories. I read 400 pages of this very shiny-papered omnibus and then decided that I’d definitely had enough.

I was really surprised. Perhaps my expectations were too high?

These early Corto Maltese stories come in very convenient format for me.

They’re all 20 pages long, which means that I can read one complete story (takes me about half an hour) before my brain starts sending out distress calls.

I’ve read these stories so many times now (in various translations) over many decades, but I still find them absolutely fascinating.

This one, though, was totally not my thing.

I mean, the artwork’s fine.

It’s just the storytelling style. I didn’t find it enjoyable, and I dropped it after a couple dozen pages.

Ditto with this, but for very different reasons.

The tablet-ey artwork looks offputting to me, and the constant fake drama — you can’t have two people just talking to each other; they have to start shouting (for no reason whatsoever) — *sigh*.

C’mon Avery Hill. What’s going on.

This comes in a box…

… and like Chris Ware’s Building Stories, it’s a collection of pamphlets in various formats.

No comparison otherwise.

But it’s fun! It’s apparently a true story, and it’s about when the author and his brother (both early 20s, I guess) were taken on a Mediterranean cruise by their mother. So you get a lot of scenes of people being bored on a cruise ship, but! The author had also been given a lot of tasks to execute (“it’s an art project”), and it makes for a good read.

I can’t say the same for this.

It’s one of those Comedies In Space, where the schtick is that the human protagonist is an asshole and a moron.

So far, so familiar, but the jokes are just so… lame. Does the writer work in animation, I wonder?

Anyway, it’s been a disappointing Week In Random Comics.

Book Club 2025: The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley

I think I bought this because I read a poem by Notley in The Paris Review?

Huh, it’s not often you read a note at the start of a poetry collection giving a user’s manual… Do the poems really need that?

OH MY GOD

I guess they do, sort of, but once you get used to it, it reads much like most other poetry. That is, it seems like Notley uses “quotation marks”

the same way
other poets
use newlines.

(Although it’s difficult not to think of Zagat’s — ‘This “restaurant” has “good” food.’)

So it reads well, really, which perhaps explains why my Penguin edition here is the 19th printing? Or perhaps it just means that this book is assigned reading in All The Colleges.

Which would be understandable — it’s extremely American. That is, it’s all metaphor and spirituality, and … I hate that sort of thing.

I did read the entire book, but I should have ditched it after the amusing novelty wore off.

The Descent of Alette (1996) by Alice Notley (buy new, buy used, 4.31 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: Ikkje by Jan Erik Vold and Steffen Kverneland

I think I picked this up at a sale a couple years ago?

This is a very shiny book — not only the cover, but the interior pages as well.

It’s really good, of course. Jan Erik Vold is perhaps the most important Norwegian poet, and the illustrations from Kverneland work well.

Illustrating poetry isn’t easy — you can be too literal (and bore the reader by repeating what’s written) or you can be too abstract (and basically just be wallpaper for the text). Kverneland avoids both problems admirably.

Ikkje (1997) by Jan Erik Vold, Steffen Kverneland