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book review

In The Dead Husband Project, author Sarah Meehan Sirk deals with themes of heartbreak, death and other forms of doom.Mike Meehan

In The Dead Husband Project, her debut collection of short fiction, Toronto writer Sarah Meehan Sirk takes a sharp pen to conceptual art, dating apps, reality TV, mommy bloggers, social media and other contemporary obsessions, often marrying preposterous scenarios with ordinary concerns. The result is a highly readable intersection of the bizarre (a date with literally no face; an art installation featuring a corpse; the discovery of a new colour) and the very real (desire, disease, death). Oh, and heartbreak. There's a lot of heartbreak.

There are 14 stories in the collection, all of them one-sitting reads. They do not exclusively deal with oddball events, but, boy, do they take a lot of sharp turns. Many of the stories begin with an ordinary scenario – a treadmill at the gym, a nursing home, a childhood memory of spring cleaning – then drop bombshells that nevertheless feel absolutely authentic. These surprising twists, braided with the most everyday of circumstances, make for an inventive, often intense – and highly readable – collection. And with each story, you wonder: What is the author saying about this world we have created for ourselves?

In the title story, for instance, an artist is tasked by her dying husband to create an art installation with his body after he's gone. The universe, however, has other career plans for the couple. The story skewers love and ambition in general, and the contemporary art scene in particular. It's wonderful. In Ozk, meanwhile, a woman mourns the love she never received from her work-obsessed mathematics professor mother – until a stranger provides a startling revelation. I gasped out loud at the final sentence.

The Date, another highlight, sees a heartbroken woman encouraged by friends to try a new, high-end dating app. But she arrives at the restaurant to a supercreepy situation: Her date has no face. She escapes to the bathroom to text her friend, but somehow finds it in her to persevere with the date. Once she gets home, however, she is sent down a whole other wacky, even creepier road – along with the reader. Another story that feels very much of the moment is A Road in the Rain, in which a woman visits a friend's ex to collect her friend's things, but when things get out of hand – first drugs, then sex – the woman blames herself.

There is often a feel of discombobulation as you begin each story – what is it exactly about? Where is it going to take me? It's rarely what you expect. Nowhere is this more the case than in Moonman, the collection's final piece. Longlisted for the Journey Prize in 2015, it traces a man's zig-zagged path to his coveted position of doomsday radio host; it leads back to the host's father's attempt to follow his own passion – and the tragic consequences of that decision. It starts with a black sky, then a blackout. What has happened? But it is not the event itself that is the focus of the piece; it is what happened to the protagonist beforehand that allowed him to survive it.

Other stories feature similarly strange scenarios, all entirely relatable until they're not. Potentially horrific news is delivered on the eve of a non-refundable family vacation; a widower tries to move on with his life; a new mother looks back on an old love as she deals with trying new circumstances; a woman, home alone and terrified when she hears a strange sound in the house, tries to reach her husband on a business trip.

The writing is sharp, crisp and alive. We are inserted firmly into the action and the emotion of the story, the headspace of the protagonist and the tension surrounding him or her (usually her). Sometimes, Sirk achieves this all in a single humdinger of a sentence. One example is this one from the story Dreams, where Carly, now an adult, thinks back to the scholarship-enabled dance lessons of her youth. "Trash, the other long-necked girls called her, tittering from the corner of the studio in a shrill fuss of tightly pulled buns."

Or, from A Road in the Rain, a paragraph so well written you feel the chill as you read it: "It had been raining for days. Damp jeans as I slid into my car, fog blanketing the windshield. Cold air blasted from the vents of the old Skyhawk. I breathed into my hands."

In these stories, death, heartbreak and other forms of doom always seem to be looming. These concise portraits of life are often devastating – but always delightful.

Marsha Lederman is a Globe and Mail arts reporter based in Vancouver.

André Alexis, winner of the Giller Prize for his book 'Fifteen Dogs'

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