The ‘capacious, accommodating past’

Graveyard Shift at the Lemonade Stand
by Tim Bowling

Calgary: Freehand Books, 2025
$22.95 / 9781990601866

Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski

*

The very title Graveyard Shift at the Lemonade Stand instantly evokes both the darkly extraordinary and the small-town ordinary. In his first short story collection, much published and recognized Albertan poet (In the Capital City of Autumn) and novelist Tim Bowling has, with often haunting effect, conjured up stories charged with both of these extremes.

In Bowling’s hands, even “lemonade stand” ordinariness packs a wallop. In his first book after The Marvels of Youth, Bowling returns, in seven of the fourteen stories, to a salmon fishing town at the mouth of the Fraser River (the author grew up in Ladner). Utterly lacking in charm, the town compensates, in spades, with almost visceral impact: a “sleepy place of rain-darkened shops and grey streets all potholes and oil-splatters,” it is permeated with smells almost as palpable as “mud, brine, dead fish, and leaf mulch.”

The richly cadenced language of such descriptions—a reminder that Bowling is a poet—ensures that small town details as ordinary as a porch light can melt into image and sound, simultaneously commonplace and transcendent: “Beyond the tree, outside the jonquil shine of the porch light, the darkness possessed a material thickness, falling in alluvial folds off the sharp edge of the invisible moon.” 

The ordinary likewise underlies the most basic life patterns Bowling stirs into life. The mundane realism of physical work is characteristic of most of the stories, but even when his protagonist is a librarian, poet, lecturer, university student, or artist, all Bowling’s stories feel solidly rooted. Paramount among the common life patterns is family, and, even more paramount, the relationship between father and son. Mostly seen from the viewpoint of the son, the father is fundamental to the son’s sense of self and reality. In “Dark, and Rain in the Air,” for example, a young boy recalls a family trip to Winnipeg where his father is to give a poetry reading. In the middle of the night, when the family is shocked awake by pounding on the hotel room door, the father must find a way of responding to a desperate prostitute’s pleas for help. In the end, the son is left with almost reverential sense of his father’s solitary ability to understand life in terms of “Dark, and rain in the air.”

While most sons are, in one way or another, in muffled awe of their fathers, Bowling can throw in a monkey wrench. In “Sidelines,” the father, riven by the need to make his children understand his past as a soccer player, takes them on a tour of local playing fields. As the afternoon progresses and the rain falls, he descends further and further into his own manic whirlpool, “as if several bones of his skeleton had simply turned to dust.” This time it is the son who must redeem his father: “I walked over and gently placed my brother’s warm body into our father’s open and repentant arms.”

In fact, in the majority of stories Bowling evokes a world where “normal” folk similarly descend into a disquieting darkness—the ordinary twists into the extraordinary. The results, admittedly, aren’t always dire: in “Tainted Love” a woman comes closer and closer to exacting revenge on a man who, as a boy, was the passive participant in her rape. In the end, though, “the chains broke, and they settled, like so much else in her life, into the capacious, accommodating past.” Similarly, in “Kapelznik in the Bottom of the Ninth,” the narrator, expecting to see a desperately disliked and ugly boy on his baseball team fall into ruin, instead finds something close to redemption and peace.

Where the darkness is coloured by humour, as in “Librarian’s Dilemma” and “This is a Test of the Emergency Book-Buying System,” it is wry, even cold, humour, delivered through the words of a troubled narrator. Remarks the mordent protagonist of the former, “I deployed all the wisdom of my forty years and retreated to the relative calm of the Dewey Decimal System.” The narrator of the second of these stories similarly recalls, “Linda manages the shop rather the way that Margaret Thatcher managed England.” These seams of humour, though, are exceptions. Nearly all the stories are shot through with characters, situations, and moods that are not just dark, but verge on a “graveyard” gothic—and especially when haunted by a troubled past.

Even on the most basic level, fear is everywhere. A sampling: “Terrified, he turned to look over his shoulder”; “The Dutchman was afraid”; “I stared at him, horrified”; “I couldn’t quite get over the rising sense of dread”; “But my sister’s face wore a child’s look of rapt curiosity that bordered on terror”; “David was staring at her with a curious expression…which looked unmistakably like fear.” And so on.  Cumulatively, the effect is chilling.

Images are equally dark, often in a wonderfully gothic way. The boy narrator of “The Boat Ride” accompanies his father and a doctor to a tiny, muddy island where, they believe, a hermit is dying—or dead. It is night. Recalls the boy: “…a massive stump emerged out of the gloom, its roots as thick as my arm and tangled like a nest of snakes.” Another boy, in “The Librarian’s Dilemma,” has started a fire in order to implicate a new boy in town of whom he is jealous. Determined to leave incriminating evidence, he runs toward the fire with the new boy’s T-shirt, horrified to see that the face on the T-shirt “seemed to laugh, dangling from his hand like Ray’s severed head.” Such moments can swell to permeate entire stories: the protagonist of “The Horses of Darkness” approaches an impoverished mining village. Again it is night: “…the occasional gnarled tree on the roadside showed the most fantastical and inky roots he’d ever seen, like the tentacles of some great sea creature.” Here, the way is paved for an entire story riven with Dantean images of hell. 

Though such horrors are largely figurative, for many protagonists figurative perception merges into waking nightmare. In “The Living” the boy narrator stares with “hatred and fear” at the tramp who has appeared from nowhere and has started living in his back yard. As his loathing deepens, the boy loses hold: “He’s burning and I can’t stop trembling. I hate him. I want him to turn to ash and blow away over the fence and sink into the tide and be washed away forever.” Worse, though, the boy is overwhelmed with a vision of the tramp taking possession of his father: “the merging is complete.”

Waking reality disappears altogether in two of Bowling’s stories. In the first of these, “As Green Grows the Grass,” an adult brother and sister feel themselves weirdly connected, almost physically, with their sister, dead since childhood. When they visit the ruins of an old movie theatre, though, the author ramps up the connection between the dead and the living: “I knew at once that all our dead were alive, even those who were dead before we were born.” Further, though, the ruined movie theatre actually emerges out of the shadows to gain, temporarily, a physical solidity. In the end, “The theatre collapsed without sound around us, collapsed like shadows.” It is in “Tidal Change,” the last story in the collection, however, where Bowling completely dispatches with the limits of the ordinary physical world: a great blue heron, before the reader’s eyes, turns into a living, breathing young man. Admittedly, the narrative tone borrows more from magic realism than from gothic horror, not least of all because the story ends chiefly on a poignant note (as, indeed, it does in “As Green Grows the Grass”).

Amongst the other “gothic” tools in Bowling’s well-stuffed toolkit, two in particular characterize the qualities of his creative imagination. The first of these is his way with characters. Especially potent in their ability to startle and engage the reader (not to mention the protagonist) are strangers.

Particularly awful are those who seem to stalk the protagonist, or, even more disturbing, mesmerize them, leaving them somehow in thrall—though, as Bowling usually suggests, more because of the protagonist than because of the stranger. In “Bartleby the Sessional,” for example, Jerris, the college lecturer, feels himself almost pursued by a student who asks repeatedly to meet up with him. Already in a feverish state of mind, Jerris finally sees the student, a “shrunken, scarved figure in a black toque slumped at a table against the far wall…. [his] eyes, which really did look full of seawater, floated in his marble skin.” Likewise, Molly, the waitress in “Tainted Love,” feels unable to tear herself away from David, a mysterious customer. She can’t shed the sense that he is stalking her—and, worse, becoming increasingly unhinged: “…once the dread began, she noticed that David’s appearance had changed. Now his eyes had a brightness that seemed feverish, and his five o’clock shadow grew heavier.” 

Even the familiar doctor in “The Boat Ride” becomes, in the young boy’s eyes, something of a monster, his “hand, hairy as a werewolf’s paw.” It is, however, the dying hermit who, in a scene echoing the iconic death scene of Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, most powerfully captivates the young protagonist: “I stared at him horrified.” Even more striking—because he is so unusual and because he demonstrates the author’s visual imagination at its most trenchant—is the Polish refugee who jumps ship and appears, out of the darkness, at the side of the young protagonist’s salmon fishing boat: “His face was huge and the cheeks marbled red and white… The mouth was almost lipless – just a thin line – but when he opened it, the number of large, crooked teeth made a shocking contrast. It was as if he was continually chewing a mouthful of bones.” Again, the situation evokes Conrad, this time of the mysterious swimmer in “The Secret Sharer.” Like the tramp in “The Living,” the Pole sinks deep into the protagonist’s deeply troubled imagination—and will not leave. 

The second most intense feature of Bowling’s handling of these disturbed and disturbing characters, though, is the fact that some of his protagonists, benign at the beginning of the stories, become in front of our very eyes vicious and even cruel. The narrator in “East and West” is perhaps most sympathetic of these: after depositing the Pole refugee on a little island and promising to bring him provisions, he guiltily abandons him. The boy narrator of “The Living,” however, calculatedly gets rid of the tramp who dominates his father’s attention by stealing money himself and making the tramp appear guilty. In “The Librarian’s Dilemma,” not only does a boy frame his rival but also, more disturbingly, the protagonist librarian (a physically ugly and misanthropic outsider), directly lies in order to doom an innocent boy.

It is easy to be misled, I’ll add. Yes, Bowling has deftly created highly unusual stories where “graveyard’” shadows loom darkly over the “lemonade stand” fundamentals. The fact is, though, the stories clearly don’t exist primarily in order to thrill with horror. On the contrary, they leave the sense that people’s lives, ordinary people’s lives, can have troubling undercurrents weaving through their very humanity. Of all lingering effects, more than any other, arguably, is a sense of poignancy. It is no accident that nearly all of the stories end with a passage, even a single sentence, that haunt the memory far more than the often disturbing events that precede them: “But already I feel myself falling, like a swimmer, like a man diving through to the fathom of his heartbeat, into the false waters that cleanse nothing and no one and reflect only a wintry sky.”

Born on Vancouver Island, Theo Dombrowski grew up in Port Alberni and studied at UVic and later in Nova Scotia and London, England. With a doctorate in English literature, he returned to teach at Royal Roads, UVic, and finally Lester Pearson College in Metchosin. He also studied painting and drawing at Banff School of Fine Arts and UVic. He lives at Nanoose Bay. Visit his website here. [Editor’s note: Theo Dombrowski has written and illustrated several coastal walking and hiking guides, including Secret Beaches of the Salish Sea (Heritage House, 2012), Seaside Walks of Vancouver Island (Rocky Mountain Books, 2016), and Family Walks and Hikes of Vancouver Island (RMB, 2018, reviewed by Chris Fink-Jensen), as well as When Baby Boomers Retire. Recently, he’s reviewed books by Stephen L. Howard, Michael Whatling, Frank Wolf, George Zukerman, Robert Mackay, Genni Gunn, Eric Jamieson, Adrian Markle, and Tim Bowling for BCR.]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster