Perilous world depicted in ‘Skeet Love’

Craig Francis Power, already known as a visual artist (under that hat he was nominate for a Sobey award) and and arts critic, is now coming on strong as a novelist. He’s won the Percy Janes Fresh Fish Award and been shortlisted for the Winterset. “Skeet Love” is his third book.

It’s set in a future that’s both distressing and recognizable. It opens in T dot, a dark and amped Toronto — throughout the prose is mainlining adrenaline. Shane wields beats and rhymes and sketches album covers, hoping to break out as a rapper. His worldview is drenched in conspiracy theories, and certainly circumstances are dire. The environment has been kicked topsy-turvy, social unrest includes televised executions, and a politician dubbed The CEO has attained the White House.

Nina is Shane’s girlfriend and partner-in-crime, though she senses their lives are rushing headlong into a dead end. Then Brit joins them. She’s a sex worker, cosmetically enhanced as per her clients’ needs. They bond as a threesome, finding a little shelter in each other’s attention and attraction.

But it’s a flimsy haven. The world is getting more perilous, and quickly. Almost as threatening is Shane’s surging paranoia. Guns and criminals are a daily menace, but Shane also sees spies hiding in the shadows and cults lurking in dark corners. It might be high time to hightail it out of town, to a place known as the 7-0-9. Brit and Nina are willing, but Nina has one request: they have to bring her little boy, Carter, who was taken from her and is being raised by her grandmother.

Two Bonnies and a Clyde, they make a trio of anti-heroes. What are we to feel for the protagonists? The perpetual drug use, the casual sex (no, casual is not the right word, it’s intimate and electrifying and it links the characters but it also feels expected and rote), the gangsta wannabe-ism, the actual ferocity.

Further distilling the 10-minutes-into-the-futurism, the author himself is incorporated in an old fashioned, alternative reality kind of way, in a series letters written from Brit to Craig, from her time to his:

Dear CFP,

Late at night, I see you on the couch in your mom’s living room while the baby sleeps in the spare bedroom, watching Youtube debates from, like, 1982, and thinking to yourself that Foucault makes Chomsky sound like a pragmatist.

To my eye/ear, the constant repetition of “yo” and “whatever” and the sustained profanity gets distracting and is textually restrictive, although Power does find considerable range within its limits. Let’s see if we can illustrate with a quote ... nope not this bit, ok maybe this — no, that won’t work — maybe that para — nope. OK, here’s a bit; let’s go back to the beginning:

One day the satellite plunged into Lake Sludge.

Shane, Nina, and Brit watching the shaky video footage on the news.

A black cylinder, glinting darkly in the light, dropping out of blue sky.

An enormous splash. Debris flying up. Shock waves in the water.

It replayed over and over, the angle of the satellite in mid-fall suggesting some terrible consequence ...

The man at the toll beside the ferry terminal watching as they pass.

It actually made him feel good to see a person behind the glass.

The black smoke from the ferry’s chimney hangs in the air above them.

They blow by a hitcher on the gravel shoulder of the highway. Just another refugee.

Her cardboard sign saying HOME.

Or this memory from Nina, which also helps set the dystopic international scene:

So I guess we’re having doubts about this whole thing, but it reminds me of back in the day, know what I’m saying? Like, we’re total refugees yo. Like my granny and poppy were when the rockets started falling and the embargo and the sea lanes were cut off, right? And basically Beirut was, like, a moon crater or whatever, you know? And then there was Palestine.

It’s a world of murky urgency. Shane, Nina and Brit are marginal in their fears of (and actual) persecution, their extreme party games, and grimy, gritty, runaway, catch-as-catchcan lifestyle. This is a story told from the edges. There’s a sense of collapse, but these characters are, by lot and essence, far from stable. Will they ever reach the 7-0-9? Will it provide the sanctuary they seek?

Guns and criminals are a daily menace, but Shane also sees spies hiding in the shadows and cults lurking in dark corners. It might be high time to hightail it out of town, to a place known as the 7-0-9.