Alternate Plains has been reviewed by Joanne Kelly in the Winnipeg Free Press. She gave the anthology a thumbs-up:
The 12 stories will give you, in most cases, the creeps and a few good jump frights, while also offering some challenging and thought-provoking visions of life on the Prairies — now and in the future.
My story, “Summertime in the Void”, got a specific mention, which makes me happy.
Stories such as Summertime in the Void are great book-club fodder¹.
In it, Patrick Johanneson creates a post-apocalyptic vision where almost all of humanity transcends to the afterlife, but God has left a few people behind: 4,229,000 people, to be exact. When the main character demands to know why, God tells him: “Your mind, John. It’s misshapen. Its scent is wrong. It’s coloured outside the lines… your thoughts, your emotions, are too far divergent from the rest of the people. You live too far outside the norm.”
You can get Alternate Plains at finer bookstores everywhere, including McNally Robinson, and apparently there’s a copy in Coles in the Brandon Shopper’s Mall (at least there was last time I checked online).
¹ In that vein, for anyone who’s already read the story, I have a couple book-club questions to ponder:
- Is “Saul” spelled correctly? Why or why not?
- How long does the action in the story actually last?