Strange landscapes
The Other Shore
by Rebecca Campbell
Hamilton: Stelliform Press, 2025
$21.00 / 9781998466016
Reviewed by Dana McFarland
“What if I change my mind?”
In Rebecca Campbell’s new collection, The Other Shore, this question ripples out from the midpoint, though stories that explore how consciousness and being may bend or alter toward finer apprehension of place and experience. Diverse in subject, time, and character, the stories feature places of the Pacific Northwest—as presence or genius loci more than mere setting—and reflect the limits of personal agency to reconcile with landscapes that are altered or altering beyond the capacity of any individual to influence.
As the collection title indicates, Campbell (The Paradise Engine) is concerned with “the other,” including in the sense of the uncanny. However, the author establishes a personal tone and sense of groundedness for the collection by consistently situating herself and her works in relation to place. In doing this, she responds to a challenge that Vancouver Island historian Kelly Black puts this way: “Explaining Settlers to ourselves in locally specific and affective ways creates the space needed to break apart self-evident Settler claims to land and develop new structures of feeling that grapple with alternative futures.” Readers who know or have passed through Pacific Northwest places that appear in these stories—forests, islands, shores—may feel a mix of recognition and dislocation as the familiar is interpreted through the author’s settler and lived experience, and transformed or distorted by imagined events. In the Introduction, Campbell writes:
When you call yourself a settler, you define yourself in negative terms: not indigenous, but also not imperialist. You say you’ve settled, tell yourself that the argument is finished, the conflict resolved, and now you’re home. Maybe. Maybe that’s why the settler landscape is necessarily Strange….
Stories in The Other Shore draw from across the breadth of myth and convention that settlers have carried to the Pacific Northwest. With gothic and faerie elements transplanted to the coastal rainforest, “Lares Familiares, 1981” may appeal to those who have enjoyed works as diverse as those by Susanna Clarke and Anne Cameron. Greco-Roman mythology pervades “A Hole Cut in the Wall of the World,” where what may be truly transformative is obscured by hubris.
Generally, Campbell’s stories tend to the speculative, the weird (venturing toward horror), and she joins other creators in demonstrating that these genres can work well to introduce “unsettling” perspectives and ideas: I think of decolonial works by Indigenous speculative writers Cherie Dimaline (Marrow Thieves), Louise Erdrich (Future Home of the Living God, The Sentence), and Waubgeshig Rice (Moon of Crusted Snow). Readers interested in unsettling and decolonial potentials of speculative fiction may also be interested to look at essays by Eve Tuck and Dallas Hunt, about, respectively, settler futurity and totem transfer.
Some stories in The Other Shore anticipate a post-human future (“The High Lonesome Frontier” and “Wider than the Sky, Deeper than the Sea”), calling to mind features of works by Charlie Jane Anders or Annalee Newitz, even while Campbell writes counter to the placelessness that can characterize post human tales. Humility, respect, and the complex relations between identity, others, and place are particular subjects of the story for which the collection is named, “The Other Shore,” and also of “The Bletted Woman,” in which belonging finally comes about through a fraught disintegration of self, into place.
Even as a longtime reader of ebooks in various modes, l am occasionally surprised by a sense of isolation from pages, places, or events that are represented through text on screen. The publisher first provided a digital file of The Other Shore for review; in reading I couldn’t help but wonder about this book that is so concerned with place would be as a physical object: how the aesthetics of the digital might be rendered as a printed text, how the interplay of narrative elements might operate—particularly since the print production of the author’s earlier novel Arboreality was remarkable.
I couldn’t satisfy these matters of curiosity, a coincidental analogy to what it is to experience a place from a remove, until a print copy of the book arrived. For those who appreciate book design, The Other Shore is a good-sized softcover volume, and the monochrome negative cover is printed with the matte side outward, suggesting the detailed but ephemeral form of a chalk illustration. The botanical and anatomical cover design elements are composed with a sinister whimsy. Interior illustrated pages are printed in monochrome negative on the felt side of the paper, producing a slight sheen by contrast, and subtly drawing attention to the other side.
In addition to the introduction which situates the author, each of the stories by the southern Vancouver island author is prefaced by context-setting “Story Notes.” The stories read well without these, but through these notes readers participate in the author’s capacity to appreciate places and events that provide inspiration, and that have been fused and transformed to suggest new possibilities. The notes also serve as a continuous narrative element, linking diverse stories through the author’s reflections on their themes. The technique recalls Brian Fawcett’s Cambodia (1986), where stories appear above a contextualizing essay printed, book-length, in the footer.
Reading the dystopic events of these stories, and the author’s commentary, pairs uneasily with the record high temperatures, wildfire events and evacuations, air quality warnings and tsunami alerts and watches of summer 2025 in BC. Yet, through these stories readers are also reminded that it is human to attempt to bridge distances that alienate, to find pockets of freedom among strata of collective choices that layer upon happenstance. In “Thank You For Your Patience” Campbell’s protagonist persists across distances imposed by geography and by corporate dysfunction to see and honour human life and connection: “I walked home hoping Misty said, ‘Thank you, Mark.’ It felt like I was slipping through a gap in the world, between noises, a kind of silent passage, the way kids slip along the abandoned rail easements in town….”
The other, the uncanny, the moment of crisis: they can unsettle the familiar, marking a “gap in the world, between noises,” a rare and precious occasion to change our minds. Rebecca Solnit, in A Paradise Built in Hell, argues that the image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it. Rebecca Campbell summarizes her “goals” in creating The Other Shore in her “Note” for the final story—goals that surface and glint across the collected stories like treasures in a turbulent quantum tideline—reminding readers that: “The world has been different before and it will be different again. Maybe even better.”
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Dana McFarland is a librarian at Vancouver Island University Library. She also works with the Community Scholars Program based at SFU, which connects eligible unaffiliated scholars in BC with academic library resources and services. She has worked with Royal Roads University, UBC, the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group, and other library collaborative organizations. She lives in stz’uminus territory and keeps bees, when they agree to stay. [Editor’s note: Dana McFarland previously reviewed Amanda Leduc, Julianne Harvey, Rebecca Campbell, and Susan Juby in BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line 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