Bad Endings

Finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award. Top 100 of 2017, Globe and Mail.&quote; Baker pushes readers to reconsider their desire for resolution. Eschewing the easy, the neat, the smoothed over, allows us to consider the things about ourselves we might not like. There's a political dimension to this. One thread running through this book is the threat of environmental collapse - drought, massive bee death, dwindling salmon stock - and humans' awkward interventions. &quote; (The Globe and Mail)&quote;Her characters possess an abundance of hard-luck stories, true, but she writes them as sometimes wrong and sometimes foolish and hence eminently human in their fallibility.&quote; (The Georgia Straight)&quote;Baker is a skillful, sensitive writer with an uncanny gift for subtle, dark humor There is no judgment or condemnation in these stories, but a tender, deep savoring of the quirks that make us human.&quote; (Foreword Magazine)Carleigh Baker likes to make light in the dark. Whether plumbing family ties, the end of a marriage, or death itself, she never lets go of the witty, the ironic, and perhaps most notably, the awkward. Despite the title, the resolution in these stories isn't always tragic, but it's often uncomfortable, unexpected, or just plain strange. Character digressions, bad decisions, and misconceptions abound.While steadfastly local in her choice of setting, Baker's deep appreciation for nature takes a lot of these stories out of Vancouver and into the wild. Salmon and bees play reoccurring roles in these tales, as do rivers. Occasionally, characters blend with their animal counterparts, adding a touch of magic realism. Nature is a place of escape and attempted convalescence for characters suffering from urban burnout. Even if things get weird along the way, as Hunter S. Thompson said, &quote;When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.&quote; In Bad Endings, Baker takes troubled characters to a moment of realization or self-revelation, but the results aren't always pretty.