Stuck in the Literary Basement: Toronto writer produces only flashes of glory in second collection of stories Final Edition

• Published in: The Ottawa citizen (1986)
• Main Author: Book, Shane
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ottawa, Ont Postmedia Network Inc 16.08.1998
• ISSN: 0839-3222

In his preface to The Stories of John Cheever, the author remarks on the pitfalls of being a young writer: "A writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork." So it is with Toronto writer [Michelle Berry]'s second collection of stories, Margaret Lives in the Basement. Berry constantly puts her characters in contact with the strange, even grotesque. Her stories are populated with mentally or physically freakish people. She accentuates their oddities largely through juxtaposition, pairing a suburban housewife with a corpse in her tool shed, an impossibly beautiful woman with her hideously misshapen son, an enormous black woman who operates a tanning booth out of her basement suite with a chain-smoking, beer-swilling neighbour who knits scarves all day in the apartment upstairs. Such circumstances would seem ripe for dramatic tension.