The Back Cover

Hannah Stephenson

Blackouts, Craig Boyko

The characters in Craig Boyko’s first collection of short fiction don’t have epiphanies.  It seems fitting that the collection is entitled Blackouts—perhaps the inverse of epiphanies.  Each story contains a blackout: a man seeking refuge from his painfully ordinary life gratefully loses consciousness; a boy’s hard-earned video game scores are wiped out when the game is unplugged; a teenage girl turns off the lights in gym class and revels in the ensuing chaos.  Throughout his eleven stories, Boyko resists closure and solution; Blackouts is a memorable conglomeration of darkly funny anticlimaxes.

The opening story sets an appropriately unsettling tone for the collection, and showcases one of Boyko’s strengths: even when describing seemingly dismal situations, he avoids heavy-handedness by downplaying drama.  “Assistance” is narrated by a man who discovers a company that features assisted suicide packages for a variety of clientele, including those “who [suffer] from none of these ‘approved,’ because visible, afflictions.”  In the Journey Prize-winning “OZY,” a boy is horrified to see that his high score in an arcade video game (marked with his gamer tag mentioned in the title) is erased in an instant, forever.  “OZY” is most effective in its mix of the ordinary (even dorky) with the philosophical.  The boy muses, “Forever was how long gone things stayed gone…how long our cool old car would stay sold to a fat salesman from Wisconsin.  It was how long the Alistairs’ house would stay burned down, it was how long World War II would stay finished.” 

My only complaint would be that the collection is perhaps one story too long; “The Black Gang” felt slightly out of place, as it is less accessible than Boyko’s best stories. My other favourites included “Holes,” in which a blind architect and his wife hire an old college friend as a live-in cook, and “White Crows,” about a sceptical professor investigating a woman’s claims of ESP.  It is a pleasure to stumble through the dark, peculiar, surprising prose of Blackouts.