Hellgoing

This is story on the verge of exceeding its narrative boundaries, and these moments are some of the most exciting in Coady’s work to date.

A sharp, insightful writer with a tight, jarring style that makes use of fast narrative cuts, Coady deliberately leaves the human scribble tangled. This isn’t out of a desire to play coy, but rather an admission that problems involving relationships don’t have easy resolutions that can be clearly expressed.

Since 1998’s Strange Heaven, her Governor General’s Award–nominated debut novel, Coady has harmonized humour and heart in prose that rings true. Hellgoing provides another reminder that her use of wit is consummate, and her regard for the reader is gracious.

Brilliant collection of short stories.

Hellgoing is hell going…Coady is a muscular writer, who drives us right smack into the situation her characters are experiencing … Coady’s stories are not about commonalities as such. They are unique.

Hellgoing is a superb collection, end to end, and easily one of the best books I’ve read so far in 2013.

Toting their trauma, Coady’s characters repel these attacks from fathers, doctors, lovers and the legion of others that ‘know best’ by learning “to hurt and insult him as effortlessly as he did me.” This rebellion lets Coady’s wicked wit shine, and while compassion from the reader is complicated by this attitude, Coady always delivers a knockout punch at the end of each story,“ like picking at your cuticles and being surprised when they start to ache and bleed.

One of the hallmarks of Lynn Coady's work is her shrewd examination of the underexplored byways of human psychology. Coady is a writer who increasingly commands attention and respect

It is the author's demonstrable strength as an ironist that prevents these stories- and these characters from appearing completely hopeless. [Coady's] sharp sense of humour serves to humanize even the most vicious or clueless figures in the book. There is searing honesty here about humankind's inability, or unwillingness, to make an effort at connection, but the author's own humanity rescues her vision from descending into despair or nihlism.

Powerful.

Coady’s Giller-winning book of stories ranges wildly in style and content, but taken as a whole is an ideal introduction to one of Canada’s finest writers.

A damned good read.

Coady’s collection is … a riddle that never arrives at an answer, offering pleasure in the discomfort of people at cross-purposes; a kind of messy realism that can be both rewarding and, at times, challenging in its hesitance to give a reader certainty.