Hard luck cases
Security and Other Shitty Jobs: Parables of the Morally Suspect
by Jason A. N. Taylor
Victoria: Jason A. N. Taylor, 2025
$13.99 / 9798281668194
Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski
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“My job is a joke. I babysit bad employees; the marginally employable people with no real skills and worse than that, no social savvy.” So says Damian, at the beginning of Jason A.N. Taylor’s short story collection Security and Other Shitty Jobs. A security officer, Damian has good reason to dislike his graveyard shift job. As the Victoria-based author makes all too clear, so do the protagonists of nearly all the other jobs he writes about. Poor pay, ungodly hours, and rough conditions: the jobs Taylor documents, readers will need little convincing, are grindingly “shitty.”
For Taylor (Owls, Doughnuts, and Democracy), however, a “job” need not just be menial employment as, for example, convenience store clerk, ski hill security man, or bouncer. A job for Taylor is just about anything desperate people find themselves doing for money. Hence two key words in the subtitle: “morally suspect.” Take Matt, for example, who, in need of money and grim with determination, sells guns to two unsavoury characters. Convincing himself that the buyers are unhinged but harmless, he later discovers that his assessment was disastrously wrong.
The most striking and sustained example of a “job” that is hardly regular employment, though, involves Ashley, a sex worker, and her porn video partner, Ryan. Their arrangements to fulfill the sad fantasies of a lonely, sexually inexperienced outsider actually form the basis of the most sustained narrative in the collection, the impact heightened by the fact that this narrative is spread over several “stories” (really episodes).
Some of the “jobs” the author writes about are more than just “morally suspect.” Some are downright illegal. It is significant, though, that Taylor uses the word “suspect” (with its possibly ironic or even slightly comic overtones) rather than, say, “dark” or “depraved.” Nearly all of his characters who step over the line are far from being hardened criminals. One arranges a minor heist—from a wealthy ski resort. Another, Karin, a single mother, finds herself helping manhandle drug dealers, but, in the process, assisting another drug dealer.
The words of Karin’s friend, Dan, show a lot about Taylor’s way of handling the “morally suspect,” though: “I don’t have a problem with drug dealing; liquor stores and pharmacies are just as bad. I stay away from violence. But can I really ever live a straight life?… I’m not good at being part of society, or I don’t have the skill to be successful in their game.” Does Dan have a point? Taylor lets the words linger on the page, unsupported, but unchallenged.
Karin, an Indigenous woman who has suffered bigotry in her attempts to get a regular job, gives a further twist to the notion of the “morally suspect.” “What the fuck should I do? I’m tearing myself apart, Dan. I need money for my boy, and I work my ass off. Now I can get it, but I have to deal with this.”
A radically different perspective on the notion of the “morally suspect” arises multiple times in the main sequence of stories dotted throughout the book—those reflected in a series of issues faced by Damian.
Narrating with a sense of gruff honesty and solid decency, Damian, as security officer, has to impose company rules in the warehouse where he works. The need to impose the rules, more than the hours or pay, most readers must feel, is actually what makes his job “shitty.” Repeatedly he finds himself having to come down hard on men who are good workers and who badly need the pay, but who don’t—quite—conform to the rules. As Damian says to one of the workers about two others, “…one way or another, those guys are going to get themselves in trouble…. Whether it’s bad or not is the question. You know I like you guys, but they’re making their bed, mocking rules. I think I can keep the damage to a minimum. That’s my goal.”
Even more grey in weighing the rights and wrongs of Damian’s job, is the fact that the author makes the moralizing general manager, Steve, the only truly ugly character in the story. Cold and unforgiving, Steve forces the rules into place, damaging lives without heed. When a “kind of a hard luck case” is fired for taking leftovers from a turkey dinner, for example, Taylor makes sure the man’s dismissal is framed with indignation: “This guy just got his act together, and we’re going to kick him down again?”
Who is the most “morally suspect”? Taylor doesn’t offer up any neat answers.
Perhaps most poignant, though, in terms of morality and rules, is the fact that Damian himself falls victim to the same tyranny of rules he has had to impose. He is fired. And, to add to the trenchancy of the theme, in his next, minimally paid job, he again must come down hard on a pathetic and downtrodden shoplifter. As he says at one point, life has laid low his moral sense: “You know, when I was 20, I had a huge list of morals and things I would do in penance if ever I broke my rules.” Now? They are, he admits with defeat, almost entirely gone.
But are they, really? As if to deepen the readers’ reactions to his “morally suspect” characters, the author repeatedly shows Damian (along with other story protagonists) to have a heightened moral sense. Whether enforcing draconian rules or breaking the law, most of his protagonists are quick to feel anxiety, remorse, and even intense guilt. John, the service station store clerk, in “Not a Victim,” is trained to fend off thieves with a golf club. Right on cue, when threatened with a knife, he swings the club. The assailant falls, dead. John is so devastated that not only does his mind go completely “numb,” but, steeped in guilt, when the police arrive, he “thought, hoped, he was under arrest.” In the most extreme case of guilt, so horrified is one protagonist by the unintentional—but possibly foreseeable—consequences of his money-making deal, that he shoots himself.
Such a perspective on the ethical undercurrents of these “parables” (as Taylor calls them in his subtitle) may suggest that the stories feel leadenly sententious, even a little staid. They are not.
Truly, Taylor’s storytelling techniques could hardly be less staid. In the first place, story after story is propelled by gnawing suspense. Any writer who ends a story by having a character write a note to himself with the words “Buy a gun” knows how to push a narrative forward. The fact, in addition, that violence is either threatened or described gives urgency to many of the stories: knives and guns play key roles, even when the knives turn out to be plastic or the guns unloaded.
In fact, so far from sedate are his stories that, in his Foreword, Taylor writes, “Readers might find these stories offensive, illogical, or ignorant.” No doubt he is absolutely correct. These stories are not for everyone. He concludes his Foreword specifying that the the book “includes racist and homophobic language, sexuality, substance use, suicide and violence.”
Not many stories, and certainly not many pages go by without alcohol, for example, playing an often troubling role—particularly disturbing where one character, in harsh detail, slides dangerously back into alcoholism. Additionally, in stories driven in large part by pure dialogue, the author makes a point of having many of his rougher characters speak with every obscenity in the book. The fact that one story is called “Ass Fucking” says a lot. It is the continuing and intermittently reported narrative involving the sex worker Ashley, though, that many readers are likely to find most disquieting. Including the viciously abusive online talk of some incels, the author also makes graphic the scenes where Ashley attempts to fulfil the sexual fantasies of the self-loathing virgin, Morris Lester—aka MoLester. The intensely sexual reactions of Ashley’s partner, Ryan, secretly filming the encounter, further show a writer determined not to hold back on graphic detail in his self-published collection.
As with many other narrative threads in his “parables,” though, the author undercuts the sense of the sordid or salacious by showing how even the most marginal characters are capable of decency. The “whore with the heart of gold” may be a common narrative trope, but with his characterization of Ashley, Taylor goes a long way to giving his character moral heft—and all the more because he vividly documents her rough “trailer park” background of drugs and abuse, concluding with her being “beaten and hit on by her mother’s boyfriend.”
In fact, Ashley’s story, and the whole book could hardly end with a stronger note of redemption. Not only do all three major characters make decisions to lead new, better lives, but in her career training, Ashley finds herself on track to be able to fulfil her dream: “I really want to help people.”
In the almost-comic story called “Something in the Coffee,” a policeman unknowingly drinks coffee laced with hallucinogenic mushrooms. The spiritual vision he thinks he has experienced may have comic resonance, but, shaped by the author’s strong sense of the “morally suspect,” it goes much further: “I questioned how I viewed the right and wrong in the world. I understood it was more about helping people who need it than punishing people for doing wrong.”
It is difficult not to feel that these are Taylor’s own words. The fact that he has them spoken by a hitherto hard-nosed policeman seems exactly right for this unusual book.
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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 has written and illustrated several coastal guides, including Secret Beaches of the Salish Sea, Seaside Walks of Vancouver Island, Family Walks and Hikes of Vancouver Island, and, recently, Family Walks and Hikes of Vancouver Island, Volume 2: Nanaimo North to Strathcona Park (reviewed by Amy Tucker), as well as When Baby Boomers Retire. In the past year, he’s reviewed books by Tim Bowling, Stephen L. Howard, Michael Whatling, Frank Wolf, George Zukerman, Robert Mackay, Genni Gunn, Eric Jamieson, Adrian Markle, and Tim Bowling for BCR.]
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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.
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