Kate Judge

Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Michael LaPointe, Cassidy McFadzean, & Naben Ruthnum, DEAD WRITERS.

PICTON, ON: INVISIBLE PUBLISHING, 2025. $23.95 

Dead Writers, a collection of new stories by four exciting young writers, is an intimate look at the psychological and emotional cost of a bargain. In these four widely diverse, entertaining, and thought-provoking stories, this anthology takes the reader through the psychological process of compromising with oneself. Whether it is to serve a need, justify a choice, or rationalize a behaviour, the narrators of the stories in Dead Writers expose their various moral weaknesses, and the depths to which they’ll sink, as they each, in different ways, compromise their values to preserve a particular self-image. Each of these first-person narratives, and the inner conflicts they evoke, drive characters and readers alike to complicated, compelling, and compromised conclusions that, as great writing can, unsettle and question more than comfort and answer.  

In “Placeless Delights,” by Naben Ruthnum, Mushtaq, a failed author who was universally disliked by those close to him, has taken his own life. Though we never meet Mushtaq, we hear of the mental health disorder that distorted his personality and made him an abrasive, violent, and caustic person. Katherine, the story’s narrator, is nonetheless convinced by Mushtaq’s mother, Reham — her benefactor and friend — to write his posthumous biography. Though she neither feels she can (nor wants to), the deal provides her with a way of escaping her own contentious and critical husband. For Mushtaq’s mother, the deal assuages the guilt of how she felt about him in life. But Katherine’s writerly search for Mushtaq does not reveal him to her; she cannot find him in his books, his notes, nor in his study at Reham’s. Finally, she discovers that Mushtaq had secretly rented a room in a student residence across the street from his mother’s house. It is here that Katherine, Reham, and his brother Aamir discover a version of Mushtaq he had taken pains to conceal from their world — not the unpleasant persona everyone knew, but a spectral Mushtaq that they never even knew to look for. This discovery of this Mushtaq might mean that, in death, he could finally make someone happy. But is it too late for Reham to find maternal happiness in what they have uncovered? 

Michael LaPointe’s “The Events at X” is a meta-fictional retelling of an historical canoe trip that places Canada’s colonial legacies of land ownership and treatment of its First Nations people under a narrative microscope. The story, presented as an unofficial document, is narrated by medical student Sidney Lawrence, who chronicles his camping adventure in northern Manitoba with his friend Bertram. Forced to stay at an outpost until Bertram’s leg heals from an injury, Sidney’s medical training is sought out by officials at a nearby rural residential school to treat three mysteriously ill students. On his visits to the school, both Sidney and the reader witness the shocking mistreatment of First Nations children first-hand. In the patronizing language of early-20th century Canada, and in the robust, crafted telling of this adventure, LaPointe manages to exploit our own readerly complicity in the colonial conduct toward Indigenous peoples. By the end of the narrative, while Sidney is forced to bargain with his own conscience to justify his choice to turn his back on these children, readers find themselves in a similar crisis of conscience that underlines our collective responsibility for the national sins of the past.

In “Getaway for Peace and Tranquility” by Cassidy McFadzean, a bargain looks like rationalizing the irrational. The unnamed narrator and her partner rent a guesthouse in Sicily called “A Getaway for Peace and Tranquility,” where strange things quickly begin to happen. Suffice it to say that peace and tranquility are not what they find. The narrator’s struggle with alcoholism has followed her abroad, and she hallucinates a series of coincidences that she comes to think hide a greater and decidedly evil truth. Or are they hers alone? Though her partner tries to reassuringly explain them away, he also sees strange things happening. Her illness and withdrawal — and its symptomology — embed themselves into the narrative just enough to sow various growing doubts around the origins of the uncanny events happening to the couple. The controlled and measured prose mirrors the control the narrator feels she must exercise over herself. The tone is eerie and deliberately stark, as the story brilliantly reveals a psychological struggle between mental and physical space that comes to dominate the narrative itself, making the reader unsure of the truth of anything. 

Finally, Jean Marc Ah-Sen’s “Praise Dissection Discussion Doubt” tells the story of a journalist named Novalis. The storytelling voice is inflected with gothic style, yet the story is set in modern France, which may be the first sign to the reader of a confused or disturbed mind at work in the narrative. She sees the words, or connections to the specific words — praise, dissection, discussion, doubt — of real-life author Stephen Potter everywhere. Potter was known for a series of books parodying the self-help genre by advising the use of manipulative strategies to make oneself look and feel good at the expense of others; unsurprisingly, Novalis begins to attach demonic significance to the words as they continue to appear. Convinced of the connection between what may otherwise just be several coincidences, she comes to obsess over the idea that she is being visited by a demon, or as she calls it, a “foeman.”  Novalis then uses her own femininity to manipulate a man with shared convictions, and a cycle of deceit begins that drives her into the legal system to exact revenge against those she feels have wronged her. Novalis’ need for vengeance drives the story itself, and it leads her to make a deal with one of her enemies — a kind of deal with the devil — to get what she so badly wants.

One of the pleasures of this collection is how diversely these four authors have interpreted their shared concept. While their tales are wildly different, Ah-Sen, LaPointe, McFadzean, and Ruthnum all lay bare the ambiguity of human morality and leave it to the reader to make any final judgements, if they dare. Dead Writers challenges the reader to enter the murky region of their own conscience, and to judge their own choices. In its mirrored questions and truths, its bright, sharp prose, this collection is a gripping read. With nuanced attention to psychological detail and intimate narrative grace, each of these stories examines the human cost of compromise and, in turn, implores the reader to consider the bargains, choices, and perspectives that have brought them to wherever they find themselves reading Dead Writers.

Kate Judge’s writing is strongly character-driven and place-centred. She finds joy in using language for the exploration, expression, and interpretation of the human condition in both prose and poetry writing. Kate loves books, stories, films, music, and art that moves her deeply. She strives to make the same emotional connection with her own readers through a memorable and engaging narrative. Kate plans to continue her education in the MFA Creative Writing program at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. She has previously been published in the Globe and Mail. Visit her website judgekate@wixsite.com and follow her on social media.