Just a Howl

By Will Richter

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1459757548
• ISBN13: 9781459757547
• Release Date: April 2027
• Publisher: Rare Machines
• Length: 200 Pages