The Puritan

Zine Review:

The Puritan

The Puritan is Ottawa’s quarterly fiction magazine–or it used to be, seeing as though the editors have now widened the journal’s availability to include Toronto. The cover of the seventh issue of The Puritan features a red hospital bracelet floating over a black void–a fairly spare departure from recent editions. The choice soon becomes clear: the stories are almost all united by a strong attention to mental and bodily harm, taking place in and out of hospitals, STD clinics, crash sites, slaughterhouses, and psych wards. Few of the included works offer happy endings; this is strong, dark, (mostly) realist fiction that doesn’t pull the punches. The fiction varies in tone from terse, 1st-person minimal modernism (Mark McCawley, Stephen Leonard, Laurie Graham), forays into the comically surreal (Steve Venright, Stuart Ross, Elaine McCluskey), gambits with fragmented timeline (Erich Mulhall, Jeanie Keogh), to full-blown, traditional narrative (John Lavery, John Ottey, Jessica Wilbanks). No interviews this time around, unfortunately. (Christopher Pratt)

Litzine, Edited by Spencer Gordon and Tyler Willis, #7, 358 Tuck Dr, Burlington, ON, L7L 2R3, puritan-magazine.com, [email protected]