Contemporary Authors

• Debris ( stories) Biblioasis (Windsor, Ontario, Canada), 2014
• In the Cage ( novel) Biblioasis (Windsor, Ontario, Canada), 2017

1. In the cage https://lccn.loc.gov/2017479565 Hardcastle, Kevin, 1980- author. In the cage / Kevin Hardcastle. First edition. Windsor, Ontario : Biblioasis, [2017]©2017 309 pages ; 21 cm PR9197.32 .H37 2017 ISBN: 9781771961479 (softcover) 2. Debris stories https://lccn.loc.gov/2015514204 Hardcastle, Kevin, 1980-, author. Debris stories / Kevin Hardcastle. Windsor, Ontario : Biblioasis, 2015. 228 pages ; 21 cm. PR9197.32 .D43 2015 ISBN: 9781771960403 (paperback)9781771960410 (e-book)

• Kevin Hardcastle - https://kevinmhardcastle.com/about/

  About

  Kevin Hardcastle is a fiction writer from Simcoe County, Ontario. He studied writing at the University of Toronto and at Cardiff University. Hardcastle was a finalist for the 24th annual Journey Prize in 2012, and his short stories have been published in journals and anthologies internationally, including The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, The New Quarterly, Joyland, Shenandoah, The Walrus, The Journey Prize Stories 24 & 26, Best Canadian Stories 15, and Internazionale.

  Hardcastle’s debut short story collection, Debris, was published by Biblioasis in fall 2015. Debris won the 2016 Trillium Book Award, the 2016 ReLit Award for Short Fiction, was runner-up for the 2016 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and was a finalist for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize.

  His highly anticipated novel, In the Cage, had just been released, and is available for order now.

  Hardcastle is represented by Dean Cooke and The Cooke Agency.

• The Vancouver Writers Fest - http://writersfest.bc.ca/author/kevin-hardcastle/

  Kevin Hardcastle
  Ontario

  Kevin Hardcastle is a fiction writer whose debut collection of short stories Debris won the 2016 Trillium Book Award and received copious accolades. His work has appeared in The Walrus, Joyland, The New Quarterly, The Malahat Review and has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and in two issues of The Journey Prize Stories. His first novel, In the Cage, is a carefully crafted story with powerful, direct prose. After an extremely vicious Mixed Martial Arts cage-fighter suffers a career-ending injury, he falls into the criminal world for work.

  @KHardcase
  kevinmhardcastle.com
  Appearing at:
  Writing Canada (1)
  Let’s Talk About Class

• CBC Radio Online - http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thenextchapter/kevin-hardcastle-alison-pick-lorna-crozier-1.4374733/why-kevin-hardcastle-writes-about-the-day-to-day-struggles-of-the-working-class-1.4374741

  QUOTE:
  I love to write about things where something is at stake. With poor or working-class people, and people going through day-to-day struggles, something is always at stake. Day-to-day things that might seem like a nuisance become fatal for some people. So automatically there is drama, a story.
  It seems to come naturally to me and it doesn't bother me at all. I don't know how it ended up being my speciality, but I think it's one of the things I do best. While it is difficult and it isn't for everybody, I had to find a way to do it where it doesn't alienate readers or becomes oppressive
  Why Kevin Hardcastle writes about the day-to-day struggles of the working class
  CBC Radio · November 1, 2017

  Kevin Hardcastle's debut novel is called In The Cage. (Biblioasis/Katrina Afonso)
  Listen17:40
  Kevin Hardcastle is a busy writer. He is currently a juror for the 2018 CBC Short Story Prize and he was named as a writer to watch by CBC Books earlier this year. His debut short story collection, Debris, won the Trillium Book Award in 2016 and his first novel, In the Cage, came out this September.

  Why Kevin Hardcastle wants to be remembered as a 'damn good writer'
  Hardcastle spoke to Shelagh Rogers about the inspiration behind In the Cage, which follows Daniel, a former mixed martial artist, who is reluctantly pulled into the criminal underworld when he starts working for a local gangster.

  Exploring the high stakes of everyday life

  "I love to write about things where something is at stake. With poor or working-class people, and people going through day-to-day struggles, something is always at stake. Day-to-day things that might seem like a nuisance become fatal for some people. So automatically there is drama, a story. Then you have to write characters that readers will care about that go through this. The minutia of their lives becomes much more interesting because everything matters. Everything that they are doing has an impact and it can have a catastrophic impact depending on how it goes."

  Finding inspiration in his father's story

  "I saw Daniel as a somebody who had a lot of skill and a lot of potential, but it never gets realized. He keeps missing his shot. That was mostly informed by my father. Daniel was a welder because that was my dad's trade. He was a very skilled man, but he could never get proper work where we lived. That was an immediate entry point to the character. But my dad wasn't a tough guy like Daniel. Daniel is a macho, trained and skilled fighter.

  "It's the idea of somebody who has to keep bashing their head against the wall — and they are doing it for the people they love — but they just can't catch a break. That's what life does to a lot of people."

  Using violence as a driving force

  "It seems to come naturally to me and it doesn't bother me at all. I don't know how it ended up being my speciality, but I think it's one of the things I do best. While it is difficult and it isn't for everybody, I had to find a way to do it where it doesn't alienate readers or becomes oppressive. It's not there to be edgy. It's not violence just for violence's sake. It has a purpose. I try to be economical and I try to have it be a driving factor of a story. If I'm going to use it, I have to use it right."

• Open Book - http://open-book.ca/Writer-in-Residence/Archives/Kevin-Hardcastle/The-Lucky-Seven-Interview-with-Kevin-Hardcastle

  QUOTE:
  if there is an overarching theme and drive that runs through all of these stories, it is the idea of endurance. Most of the stories are pretty heavy in material and tone, but I don’t see them as hopeless or inspirational. There aren’t many epiphanies or grand changes that happen to the characters in there. They don’t lament their hard lives or try to escape without it happening organically. They endure until they can’t anymore, or until that becomes enough to live off.

  The Lucky Seven Interview, with Kevin Hardcastle
  By Grace
  DATE
  October 28, 2015
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  Kevin Hardcastle Writer in Residence Lucky Seven Interview
  We are thrilled to have debut author Kevin Hardcastle on board as our November 2015 writer-in-residence at Open Book. His short story collection, Debris has created tons of buzz, especially after Kevin's Journey Prize nomination and his popular short story "Montana Border" appeared in The Walrus. We couldn't be happier to be working with him as his career takes off — be sure to visit Kevin's WIR page throughout November to hear from him!

  He talks to us as part of our Lucky Seven series, and tells us about coming into publishing his new book backwards, how great books change you and his upcoming novel.

  Open Book:
  Tell us about your new book, Debris.

  Kevin Hardcastle:
  It sort of all happened backwards, with a novel on the block that nobody wanted. I was always writing short stories between the longer work, and I started having them published pretty regularly. I’ve learned that if you wait on something without working, you’ll have squat if what you’re waiting from doesn’t come. In any case, John Metcalf read a story of mine, Old Man Marchuk, and called me up on the phone, sent me a letter about it. He told me that he wanted that one for Best Canadian Stories and that he was also the fiction editor at Biblioasis. He asked if I had any more short fiction, and I told him I had a pile of it. I sent most of what I had to him and he wrote back saying we’d get a book done. That was it, after all those years of trying it the hard way.

  OB:
  Is there a question that is central to your book, thematically? And if so, did you know the question when you started writing or did it emerge from the writing process?

  KH:
  I wouldn’t say that it is a question, but if there is an overarching theme and drive that runs through all of these stories, it is the idea of endurance. Most of the stories are pretty heavy in material and tone, but I don’t see them as hopeless or inspirational. There aren’t many epiphanies or grand changes that happen to the characters in there. They don’t lament their hard lives or try to escape without it happening organically. They endure until they can’t anymore, or until that becomes enough to live off.

  As I wrote all of these over time, and without designs on them being a collection, I didn’t think of any real central or unifying element. But I think these stories and characters inhabit a cohesive enough universe that that sort of theme was bound to run through them all.

  OB:
  Did the book change significantly from when you first starting working on it to the final version? How long did the project take from start to finish?

  KH:
  By the time this all got to Metcalf, most of the stories had been published or were on the way to being published. I am pretty goddamn hard on myself in the writing and editing, and John and me have sensibilities that line up well, so mostly he liked what I liked. Mostly. I wrote some new stories after signing with John and Biblioasis, but I think they turned out to be some of my best "Montana Border", "The Rope", "Most of the houses had lost their lights". If we are talking about the project as far back as the oldest story in it, "To have to wait", that one was written in 2009. But, by and large, the stories that are the strongest I wrote over the past three years. The editing on the back end took a lot of work, to get all my compound words and bad English consistent. But the actual process of compiling and arranging the stories, and the major edits, didn’t take much time at all.

  OB:
  What do you need in order to write — in terms of space, food, rituals, writing instruments?

  KH:
  I don’t need much other than a computer and my notes and a place where there are no other people, or at least none that I have to interact with. I’m not a believer in totems and rituals and writer’s block. Probably that comes from some very lean times where I had to write stories and most of a book in computer labs and such, as I didn’t have a computer of my own or many resources. And the writing for me has to happen. It’s not regimented in words a day or anything, not at all. But it has to happen at some point and for that I will do whatever it takes to get it done. Luckily now I have the few things I need, and have found a couple spaces to be alone to write. That might sound like it’s not much, but I remember harder days and I think it helps to think on them when things seem tough.

  OB:
  What do you do if you're feeling discouraged during the writing process? Do you have a method of coping with the difficult points in your projects?

  KH:
  I deal with all of it by keeping notes and planning stories wire to wire. I usually have point form notes of all the major plot points by the time I start anything, and, if anything interesting happens between those points, or if the story veers off a little, that’s alright, because I’ve figured out the drive for that story and almost always have the ending locked up.

  Focus is everything for me. I can jump in and out of it, luckily, but when I write best I’m fully zoned in and I am not wasting words or lines. I almost never move on to the next line until I’ve got the last one right. It seems like that would be a pain in the ass, but if I’m focused and the story matters I can write at that pace. I think it helps with precision, and it saves me a ton of grief in revisions.

  OB:
  What defines a great book, in your opinion? Tell us about one or two books you consider to be truly great books.

  KH:
  A great book changes you. When you’ve read it you are never the same again. I also believe that the best books are those that have real vision but, also, the finest craft performed by the author throughout. I know that you can be affected by the idea of a book or what it signifies, but for the books I’m talking about you don’t need to be partway invested or of a mind to absorb them beforehand. If you find them at whatever time in your life, they will do a number on you.

  I’ll name two that I think are truly great. The first is Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. That book ruined me. It’s my favourite novel. It is not as lean as some of his other novels, but the ground it covers is so absolute, and there is an almost biblical weight to the storytelling and the seemingly inevitable path of the characters. There are those who might say McCarthy pushes it a little with some of the prose, but, given that he is aiming for heights that most writers wouldn’t and shouldn’t dare aim for, the odd line that gets off the leash is a very small price to pay. What you get in that book is some of the finest writing and one of the most terrifying and permanent novels in the English language. McCarthy’s technical precision and his way of bending history to his means are untouchable.

  Another one is a collection of short fiction, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, by Alistair MacLeod. I’ve been on the record more than once about this book, and how important those short stories have been in my development as a writer. It is a true master class in craft and in not wasting a single word, in how to get real, honest sentiment out of a story. Anyone who knows what they’re talking about knows how extraordinary that work is. The Lost Salt Gift of Blood carries so much heft for a small book. I believe it is the high watermark for short fiction writers in this country.

  OB:
  What are you working on now?

  KH:
  I eventually ended up finding a home for that novel I mentioned earlier, with Biblioasis and John Metcalf. It is called In the Cage, and it’s tentatively scheduled for release next fall. Unlike the collection, the novel really gives John something to tear into, as it was written before this run of stories and has already gone through some rewrites and line edits before we reshape the thing. For anyone who read and enjoyed my story in The Walrus, "Montana Border", the novel will probably be up their alley. Metcalf actually suggested I mine the material of the novel for a story or two while he read it over, and that is what I did there.

  The novel is about a retired MMA or cage fighter, who is reduced to working as muscle for a mid-level gangster in rural Ontario, and taking piecemeal work as a welder, to make ends meet for his wife and daughter. As the crime landscape changes, and his situation gets more desperate, the protagonist takes some risks with more violent, career criminals, and also gets back in the cage again as a fighter. It covers a lot of that territory people might have come to expect in the stories, and it is violent and a lot of people don’t get out of it alive, but it is really a story about that young family and their fortitude. They are on the margins geographically and financially, and when what little they have might be taken away, they do as they always have at the worst. They fight.

  The views expressed in the Writer-in-Residence blogs are those held by the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Open Book.

QUOTE:
In the Cage introduces readers to a memorable character who treads life's waters just trying to keep his head above the current.
IN THE CAGE
Aaron Broverman
This Magazine.
51.3 (November-December 2017): p42. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Red Maple Foundation http://www.thismagazine.ca/
Full Text:
IN THE CAGE
By Kevin Hardcastle Biblioasis, $19.95
In the Cage, the first novel by Kevin Hardcastle, follows his award-winning 2015 short story collection, Debris. Like his previous work, In the Cage concerns petty organized crime, rural poverty, and the hard-knock life of Mixed Martial Arts fighters. This time, it features Daniel, whose career-ending injury forces him to keep his family afloat through organized crime. When he tries to go straight, he finds himself up against a returning criminal with a vendetta that promises to take the little Daniel has. Through precise descriptions, In the Cage introduces readers to a memorable character who treads life's waters just trying to keep his head above the current.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Broverman, Aaron. "IN THE CAGE." This Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 2017, p. 42. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A523104869/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=011f341f. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.
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QUOTE:
all bare-bones sentences and salt-of-the-earth characters, will find a following with fans of Chuck Palahniuk
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In the Cage
Publishers Weekly.
264.36 (Sept. 4, 2017): p63. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
In the Cage
Kevin Hardcastle. Biblioasis (Consortium, U.S. dist.; UTR Canadian dist.), $24.95 (292p) ISBN 978-1-77196-147-9
Hardcastle's debut novel (following the story collection Debris), all bare-bones sentences and salt-of-the-earth characters, will find a following with fans of Chuck Palahniuk. Daniel, the book's scarred but hopeful protagonist, is an itinerant MMA fighter who returns to his depressed Ontario hometown after an injury sidelines him. He is soon jobless and has to become a local thug's enforcer in order to support his family and pay his mortgage. Once released from that contract, he struggles to get by working as a welder. Before long, his dream to fight in the ring again collides catastrophically with a childhood friend now caught up in the town's criminal underworld. The brutal, blood-soaked concluding chapters suggest that Daniel's wife is wholly mistaken when she tells him, "We'll make do." Readers less smitten than the novel is with Daniel's masculine physicality and capacity to inflict harm might find the bleakness of the setting overwrought and the Grand Guignol bloodiness less an insightful account of poverty in contemporary Canada than macho pulp fiction. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"In the Cage." Publishers Weekly, 4 Sept. 2017, p. 63. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505468047/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=9e9b893e. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505468047
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QUOTE:
crime novel with the pulse of a sports drama and the bitter toxicity of the best country noir.
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Hardcastle, Kevin: IN THE CAGE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Aug. 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hardcastle, Kevin IN THE CAGE Biblioasis (Adult Fiction) $14.95 10, 10 ISBN: 978-177196-147-9
A mixed martial arts gladiator falls prey to local hoodlums when he and his family return home to rural Ontario. This debut novel by Canadian writer Hardcastle (Debris, 2016) is a scorched- earth crime story built out of brittle prose and barely suppressed violence. Our protagonist is Daniel, once a renowned cage fighter who has given up the sport due to injury and worries from his wife, Sarah, and young daughter, Madelyn. The first contemporary scene opens on the wreckage of Daniel's truck, stolen and trashed by a perturbed local. Daniel is something of a wreck himself, having returned to his hometown in shame and working odd jobs to get by. We soon learn that he's fallen in with an old friend of his father's named Clayton, a thug up to his ears in drugs, theft, and other crimes. Daniel is just providing muscle, but he finds his craving to fight runs deeper than he imagined. He starts training with Jasper, a trainer at a small gym. Asked if her husband is even fit to fight, Sarah says, "We won't know unless he actually fights....But, whatever he thinks, I don't believe he's the kind of man to just take this back up as a hobby." Finally, Daniel agrees to a competitive match in a local ballroom, with Clayton betting a significant sum on him to win. This is a masterful mashup between genres, matching the masculine violence of the cage match with country-tinged, Mamet-esque dialogue that elevates these characters into rich portraits of desperate people living for sheer survival. A crime novel with the pulse of a sports drama and the bitter toxicity of the best country noir.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hardcastle, Kevin: IN THE CAGE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500365049/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=5fbe7eb8. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500365049
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QUOTE:
well structured, engaging, and hard to dislike.

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In the Cage
Shawn Syms
ForeWord.
(June 27, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 ForeWord http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Full Text:
Kevin Hardcastle; IN THE CAGE; Biblioasis (Fiction: General) 14.95 ISBN: 9781771961479
Byline: Shawn Syms
Hardcastle's descriptions of crimes and brawls spare no gore, but they also possess an elegant choreography that is vivid, energetic, and well-paced.
Kevin Hardcastle, whose story collection Debris won the Trillium Book Award, continues to explore small-town Ontario life in his moody, atmospheric debut novel, In the Cage. It is a story of rural poverty, criminal brutality, and one man's fight to survive.
Daniel lives in a cage of constricting circumstances -- too many bills, not enough money, partial days of manual labor that never add up to a full-time paycheck. But the titular cage also refers to the place Daniel may once have felt most alive.
A widely revered -- and feared -- mixed-martial-arts grappler, he fought his way from native reserves to community halls, leaving a trail of broken bones behind him. But that was before he married Sarah and they had Madelyn. Daniel aims to walk the straight and narrow, but aiding crooked bikers in violent mayhem brings easy money.
If you think this is heading somewhere tragic, you may be right.
Although this book supercharges stereotypical tropes of working-class masculinity, it's far from retrograde or sexist: Daniel's world-weary wife matches him drink for drink, and his daughter is as scrappy a fighter as her dad. Hardcastle's descriptions of crimes and brawls spare no gore, but they also possess an elegant choreography that is vivid, energetic, and well paced.
Hardcastle's spare style adds to -- and detracts from -- the book's success. At best, his tense, abbreviated sentences reveal character, amplify mood, and create stark imagery: home after abetting an unplanned quadruple murder, an unnerved Daniel "sat in his gitch on the edge of the couch cushions." Sarah works in an old-age home; nighttime unrest there is perfectly captured as "the difficult shifting of bodies."
Yet Hardcastle's choice of a dialect-inflected narrative voice can grate. People hit by bullets don't fall down, they "crumple strange." The relentless removal of "-ly" from adverbs -- a van "rode
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slow"; a quiet sound "rang soft" -- only draws attention to their overuse. Add in some worn clichA[c]s and overused expressions, and the distraction is very real.
Despite its rough edges, In the Cage -- like its protagonist, Daniel -- is well structured, engaging, and hard to dislike.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Syms, Shawn. "In the Cage." ForeWord, 27 June 2017. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497627286/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=8ac0552d. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497627286
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QUOTE:
Debris pulls back the thin veneer of order at the surface of rural living, revealing the unfailingly violent and the guiltily satisfying.
Debris offers a fresh perspective on a familiar genre, and can be recommended for this very reason.
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Debris
Joel W. Vaughan
Broken Pencil.
.70 (Winter 2016): p40. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 Broken Pencil http://www.brokenpencil.com
Full Text:
Debris
Kevin Hardcastle, 228 pgs, Biblioasis, biblioasis.com, $19.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
One cannot help but acknowledge Kevin Hardcastle's appeal to the Wild West in his first collection of short stories--not necessarily of the Spaghetti-Eastwood variety, but certainly with an element of the running-and-gunning frontier narrative. While Debris follows an assorted cast of characters through their should-be normal lives in the rural west, it is punctuated by "distant reports of rifle-fire. High whine of small engines. coyotes whooping at each other in a nearby field." In other words, Hardcastle's version of the boondocks is anything but reassuring.
Debris pulls back the thin veneer of order at the surface of rural living, revealing the unfailingly violent and the guiltily satisfying. Drooling coyotes stalk the door-to-door salesman as he crosses the field between subdivisions; police hash out vendettas under the cover of rural isolation; the doting housewife, wary of drifters and trained with a hunting rifle, finds a bloated body in her swimming pool. Catastrophe lurks in the corner of every farmhouse, field, and pantry, creating back-allies in a setting usually idealized or entirely disregarded.
This is not to say that Debris lacks subtlety, for Hardcastle manages heart-pumping scenes without ever coming off as trite, and his characters are always firmly grounded in the familiar--a fact which makes the carnage lurking offstage all the more unnerving. Debris offers a fresh perspective on a familiar genre, and can be recommended for this very reason. (Joel W. Vaughan)
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Vaughan, Joel W.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Vaughan, Joel W. "Debris." Broken Pencil, Winter 2016, p. 40. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A443283069/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=cc039bea. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A443283069
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QUOTE:
fierce, beautiful book.

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Why we fight; The beauty and
brutality of Kevin Hardcastle's In the
Cage
J.R. McConvey
Globe & Mail (Toronto, Canada).
(Sept. 16, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: pR18. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 The Globe and Mail Inc.
http://www.globeandmail.com
Full Text:
Byline: J. R. McCONVEY
In the Cage By Kevin Hardcastle Biblioasis, 309 pages, $19.95 S ome people like a fight. Take the millions who recently paid a hundred bucks a pop to watch the boxer Floyd Mayweather wallop Conor McGregor, a mixed martial artist. Or there's Daniel, the protagonist of Kevin Hardcastle's In the Cage, who needs a fight like some need prayer: as a calming agent, a lifeline.
Daniel is a retired cage fighter fallen on hard times, trying to support his family in Ontario's Simcoe County. He's got limited options for work and a connection to rural crime that makes for low-hanging but poisonous fruit.
The novel tells Daniel's story in three overlapping spheres: At home with his wife, Sarah, and their 12-year-old daughter, Madelyn; among a gang of dealers and thugs he's known for years; and at the gym, where he trains, punishing heavy bags and flattening opponents. Together, they make for a stark, detailed portrait of a particular social and cultural setting - although, interestingly, specific geographical locations are rarely named.
Hardcastle works in a noirish, folkloric mode that draws on Cormac McCarthy, Alistair MacLeod and Breaking Bad. He's noted his fondness for the American writer Donald Ray Pollock, and shares thematic territory and a taste for blood with fellow Toronto author Andrew F. Sullivan. Descriptions of his work tend to use the language of a weigh-in. "Taut" is a favourite, as is "muscular."
There's something of those qualities in the strength of his prose, but both words imply a rigidity that does a disservice to Hardcastle's technical grace. The novel's language is fundamentally based in movement. The fight scenes are highlights, especially an exhilarating, mid-book sparring match between Daniel and his training partner, Jung Woo: "Jung Woo pushed forward but Daniel would not give and then he came untethered and drilled the Korean with hooks and an off-angle uppercut that sent the man sideways with his legs stiff and his glove drawing in the air as it came up late to block. They each ate the other man's right hand as the buzzer rang to call the round."
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Yet there are many smaller, gentler gestures - a hand laid on a shoulder, a wine glass moved just so - that carry as much weight in the larger choreography. Hardcastle's sentences are clean and hard, but the combinations are complex and deliberately crafted. Imagine the slow wrapping of a fist, knuckle by knuckle, and you get a sense of how Hardcastle tightens his narrative with a precision physics that's grim, hypnotic, sometimes heartbreaking, always humane.
In the stories from his Trillium Book Award-winning debut collection, Debris, Hardcastle's stylistic tics could occasionally feel intrusive. There's some of that here, a few too many "that man"s in too few pages, a couple spots begging for a comma. In general, though, the novel digests his epic cadences more easily than the short fiction, and the distinguishing marks of his style help cast a biblical mood. There is vivid description of the Ontario landscape and of the suburban industrial zones where unsavoury characters conduct lethal bids for control of the local drug trade.
There's dialogue that crackles with apocalyptic threat.
The success of this McCarthyan scope, the existential spectrum of light and darkness in the book, is also reason to avoid casting Hardcastle strictly as a social realist. In media materials, much is made of the novel's focus on the rural poor and its grounding in Simcoe County, where Hardcastle grew up. Like Steinbeck, though, Hardcastle's realism reaches beyond spokesmanship, to cosmic truths, mythic forms - and, sometimes, harsh extremes. If anything, his sole pulled punch is how the book's perspective sometimes leans too far toward Sarah's idealized version of Daniel, even though it recognizes the schism in him early on. For all that man's
heart and all his plight, he's no working-class hero; he's bound to violence and his restless limbs have deadly potential.
We empathize with Daniel, though, because of those little movements and moments, especially the ones he shares with his daughter - a relationship that feels genuine and poignant. Likewise, the scenes involving Sarah, Jung Woo and his older friend, Murray, are filled with warmth and care.
These tender passages are contrasted with underworld scenes that increase in pitch and intensity until they rival anything from No Country for Old Men - there's even an Anton Chigurh-like psychopath to execute the bloodiest bits. The resulting rhythm winds up tension and propels the reader toward the grisly inevitability of the final pages. Though Hardcastle works in deep emotional territory, the novel reads like a thriller.
In discussions of both pugilism and class, what's often missed is how the world contains many notions of beauty. Assumptions on these grounds can widen fault lines along geographical and social divides. Hardcastle shows us how, depending on where you stand, beauty can look much different than you might expect - but also ways in which the common beauty of small joys links us, and how cruelty is our undoing.
Whether you like a fight or not, chances are, something in this novel will move you. In the Cage is a fierce, beautiful book.
10 of 11 4/17/18, 11:32 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
J.R. McConvey is a writer based in Toronto.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
McConvey, J.R. "Why we fight; The beauty and brutality of Kevin Hardcastle's In the Cage."
Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 16 Sept. 2017, p. R18. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504785911/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=56905505. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504785911
11 of 11 4/17/18, 11:32 PM

Broverman, Aaron. "IN THE CAGE." This Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 2017, p. 42. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A523104869/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=011f341f. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018. "In the Cage." Publishers Weekly, 4 Sept. 2017, p. 63. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505468047/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=9e9b893e. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018. "Hardcastle, Kevin: IN THE CAGE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500365049/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=5fbe7eb8. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018. Syms, Shawn. "In the Cage." ForeWord, 27 June 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497627286/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=8ac0552d. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018. Vaughan, Joel W. "Debris." Broken Pencil, Winter 2016, p. 40. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A443283069/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=cc039bea. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018. McConvey, J.R. "Why we fight; The beauty and brutality of Kevin Hardcastle's In the Cage." Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 16 Sept. 2017, p. R18. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504785911/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=56905505. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.

• Prism Magazine
  http://prismmagazine.ca/2015/10/21/ditchturf-and-thawmud-the-new-frontier-of-kevin-hardcastles-debris/
  Word count: 1077

  QUOTE:
  Hardcastle’s prose is sparse and tightly controlled.
  It’s this economy that keeps the reader so close to the page. Reviews of this book will no doubt allude to the ‘muscularity’ of the prose and liken Hardcastle to other writers in the country-noir tradition, but Debris earns its place as a book among books, deserving of even the most serious literary reader’s praise.

  Reviewed by Adrick Brock

  CRdG0waUEAAeVhhDebris
  Kevin Hardcastle
  Biblioasis, 2015

  In Debris, the title story in Kevin Hardcastle’s first published collection, an old woman trudges through snowy fields with a rifle slung over her shoulder, hunting a local killer. Emily, the protagonist, seems to be the only person capable of defending the community. The police (who appear in many of the stories in Debris) are ineffectual, and Emily’s husband, Bob, is incapacitated on the couch with boils. The violence outside their home offers a stark counterpoint to tender moments between the old couple. When a dead woman has been discovered in their pool, for instance, and the killer reappears on their property, they still manage to hold one another’s hand and to chuckle about Bob’s late night erection, which he ascribes to “one a’ them pills.” (210) Hardcastle is intent on showing us the polarity of life in small-town Canada, at once beautiful, dangerous and bizarre.

  Violence is the engine in almost all of the stories. In the opener, “Old Man Marchuk”, a small-town police officer is forced to take up a rifle to defend his home from the cronies of the local criminal he’s recently arrested. “The Shape of a Sitting Man” pits the protagonist against a gang of thugs who, prior to the story’s beginning, carried out a debilitating attack on the man’s brother. In “Bandits”, one of the lengthier stories in Debris, a young man named Charlie joins the ranks of his father and uncles, who rove the frozen lakes of the Muskokas on bobsleds and break into liquor stores late at night. Luck never seems to be on the side of Hardcastle’s characters, and the tragic ending of “Bandits” (spoiler alert) reads with the elegiac gusto of a Bruce Springsteen ballad, where the criminals are never as bad as you think, and the cops are never as good.

  Debris is at turns cold and sinister in its outlook (there is a good deal of gore, and a lot of below-freezing temperatures), but it sings with the whisper of hope. “The Rope” reveals a tender relationship between a young man and his alcoholic mother, and “One We Could Stand to Lose” offers a soft-spoken take on an aged hotelkeeper whose building is slated for demolition.

  Hardcastle’s prose is sparse and tightly controlled. He goes for sonically rich, off-kilter verbs like squelch, shuck, knuckle and rent, and he amasses a dictionary’s worth of new nouns, foregoing hyphens in favour of condensation. Ditchturf, thawmud and bacongrease are among his better mash-ups.

  He writes with the rhythm of a fighter (Hardcastle trained in Muay Thai) and his knock-out punch appears to be the sentence fragment. Read Debris and you’ll discover them on nearly every page:

  Nucleuses of fire carried up logs and sticks. (42)
  Stew of medication in his blood. (49)
  Crack of riflefire in the hollow. (224)

  In his commitment to hyperrealism in the dialogue, Hardcastle sometimes loses his handle and veers into campiness. “Well thank ‘em for me will ya,” the officer in “Old Man Marchuk” says at one point in the story. “Sure,” the constable replies. “Keep your radio nearby. Anything comes up I’ll squawk at ya.” (23)

  At its least effective, Hardcastle’s commitment to a lean prose style exhausts the reader. In “To Have to Wait”, the writing feels one-dimensional and unfocused. The narrative lens keeps swivelling between the two brothers, never quite granting us access into their minds. Perhaps it has to do with the story’s placement, smack in the middle of the collection. Hardcastle deals in overt themes and motifs, and by doing so he runs the risk of oversaturation.

  Debris’ crowning accomplishment is the story “Montana Border”, which featured in the June 2015 issue of The Walrus. Here Hardcastle achieves a perfect balance between lyricism and the short, fractured sentences that in other stories feel overused. Describing the character’s drive south to his next fight, Hardcastle writes:

  He drove across the Montana border with the sun risen pale behind a grey sky. There were rains that had travelled ahead of him and left the asphalt black and slick. (201)

  In the midst of a fight scene Hardcastle shortens up his jabs, revealing the action with crisp sensory details:

  The wrestler had Daniel’s foot but Daniel shucked loose and circled out, drilled him with a straight right and then a left hook as the man got up. Blood from the wrestler’s lip and nose. Tired-dog look in his eyes. (191)

  It’s this economy that keeps the reader so close to the page. Reviews of this book will no doubt allude to the ‘muscularity’ of the prose and liken Hardcastle to other writers in the country-noir tradition, but Debris earns its place as a book among books, deserving of even the most serious literary reader’s praise.
  Adrick Brock’s fiction has appeared in EVENT, The Malahat Review, Riddle Fence and is forthcoming in The Dalhousie Review and The New Quarterly. He is a recent graduate of the University of British Columbia’s MFA program.
  October 21, 2015 at 10:40 am
  Prose, Reviews, Uncategorized
  2015, Adrick Brock, Anita Bedell, Biblioasis, canlit, Fiction, Fiction Review, Kevin Hardcastle, PRISM, prose, Prose Review, Review
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• New York Journal of Books
  https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/debris-1
  Word count: 621

  QUOTE:
  Debris proves that Kevin Hardcastle is very a good writer interested in telling very similar stories. Hardcastle is clearly a talent worth watching as he broadens his focus in the future.

  Debris
  Image of Debris
  Author(s):
  Kevin Hardcastle
  Release Date:
  February 8, 2016
  Publisher/Imprint:
  Biblioasis
  Pages:
  200
  Buy on Amazon
  Reviewed by:
  Michael Adelberg

  “Hardcastle is clearly a talent worth watching . . .”

  A roughneck named O’Hara learns that his infirmed father was killed inside a nursing home. A man named DeCarlo, also a nursing home resident, has pushed down O’Hara’s father while in a stupor. O’Hara roughs up DeCarlo, but police prevent O’Hara from returning and killing the old man. So O’Hara heads for the house of DeCarlo’s son. This sad, poignant story “Spread Low on the Fields“ is typical of the nine stories in Kevin Hardcastle’s collection, Debris.

  Other stories work the themes of violence and family grudge, performed by angry men with idle time and too much alcohol. Hardcastle’s protagonists include a brawler fighting for meager purses, an adult son caring for an alcoholic mother, a young man stuck in the family business of banditry, a murderer on his trek home, and a woman who reassembles a life for herself and a mentally ill husband.

  Despite all the booze, violence, and testosterone, there is a feminist undercurrent to Hardcastle’s stories. For example, in “Montana Border” and “Most of the Houses Had Lost Their Lights,” women characters civilize errant males. Civilizing love interests of the protagonists in “Bandits” and “Shape of a Sitting Man” are pushed aside by ties back to dysfunctional families. In “Debris,” a woman shoots a murderer camped on her land while her infirm husband watches television.

  Hardcastle casts a critical eye on family dynamics across these stories. Bonds between kin are powerful but rarely a positive influence. Parents suck down children who cannot break away from their alcoholism and violence. When not brawling with each other, brothers and fathers take revenge on outsiders who have hurt the family.

  Harcastle’s stories are set in unnamed parts of rural Canada—sparsely populated places speckled with run-down marinas, rusting trailers, and pick-up trucks on the edge of exhaustion. Morose and pervasive alcoholism is endemic to the human condition. Undermanned and non-confrontational police arrive too late to stem the violence.

  There is much to like in Hardcastle‘s stories. He writes with a folksy intelligence reminiscent of John Steinbeck, eg Hardcastle describes the labored walk of an aging woman protagonist this way: “Her knees were singing to her about the humidity.” But Hardcastle’s plots and people are notably more pessimistic.

  Perhaps Hardcastle’s short stories have more in common with those of Alan Heathcock and Josie Sigler, who also recently published intelligent, gothic short story collections (respectively Volt: Stories and The Galaxie and Other Rides) are also set in rural northern climes. But Healthcock and Sigler worked harder to balance light and dark. The sameness to the stories in Debris makes this collection slightly less successful.

  In total, Debris proves that Kevin Harcastle is very a good writer interested in telling very similar stories. Hardcastle is clearly a talent worth watching as he broadens his focus in the future.

  Michael Adelberg is the author of the award-winning history book, The Theatre of Spoil and Destruction: The American Revolution in Monmouth County, and three well-reviewed novels, A Thinking Man's Bully, The Razing of Tinton Falls, and Saving the Hooker.
  Buy on Amazon

• National Post
  http://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/jacked-up-myths-for-working-stiffs-kevin-hardcastles-debris-reviewed
  Word count: 1165

  QUOTE;
  The book has flesh and bone, soul and brain. It’s a rare, rock-solid first book by an anatomist of the damaged. Hardcastle has things to show us, and we can’t look away.
  Hardcastle is already one to watch.

  Jacked up myths for working stiffs: Kevin Hardcastle's Debris, reviewed
  If it's blood and guts you're after, you’ll get more than you bargained for from Kevin Hardcastle’s debut collection
  Special to National Post
  Special to National Post

  October 16, 2015
  12:48 PM EDT
  Filed under

  Culture Books

  Comment

  Debris
  Kevin Hardcastle
  Biblioasis
  200 pp; $20

  If it’s blood and guts you’re after, you’ll get more than you bargained for from Kevin Hardcastle’s debut collection, Debris. The book has flesh and bone, soul and brain. It’s a rare, rock-solid first book by an anatomist of the damaged. Hardcastle has things to show us, and we can’t look away.
  Debris-coverDebris builds a broad picture of trouble. The opening piece, “Old Man Marchuk,” centres on a failed rural robbery whose ripples expand into near murder and threats of worse. Next comes “The Rope,” in which a man tries to help his alcoholic mother pull herself back from the brink. The characters are frequently desperate, scrabbling out lives in rough places, from the oil patch to nameless backroad settlements. Amidst these battles, Hardcastle supplies snatched glimpses of underbellies — vulnerability made all the more painfully plain for the rarity of our access to it.

  So what, amid all the suffering, gives a reader the will to carry on? Nobody in these stories is going gentle into that good night, or any good anything, and they know it. In spite of hard times, they are ferociously tenacious and clear-eyed, even hopeful, and this is their great appeal.

  Hardcastle’s characters have an almost mythical quality. His people feel like smalltown versions of Sisyphus or Odysseus, shouldering boulders uphill forever or craftily finding ways to survive another five minutes. As in ancient myths, the violence and disaster here can’t be avoided. The gods use humans as a puppet show, and the hits keep coming. But the characters continue to fight fate’s unfairness, however difficult or futile the fight may be. The monsters are usually crime, poverty, and illness, and sometimes they’re concrete; in “Hunted by Coyotes,” the protagonist hurls his clothes at the feral animals who stalk him through half-built Alberta suburbs. He may be trapped in the labyrinth, but he head-butts the Minotaur — and the coyote, and the walls — every chance he gets.

  Overall these are stories of masculinity, often of the most brutal kind. Fighting is a constant; the outstanding “Montana Border,” for instance, depicts a Mixed-Martial-Arts fighter trying to carve out an existence. He is willing to bring hell down on his own head if it will save his girlfriend. It’s a plotline we know, but rather than reading as some Die Hard knockoff, it’s a probing look at what it’s actually like to be a man like this, living in a world like this.

  Debris is especially tender about men wanting to protect pregnant partners. In places, the female characters can feel unfleshed, sketchy figures with “dark, dark hair.” But several of the stories have women protagonists trying to shield men weakened by circumstance. “He was sick when I married him,” says Kayla simply in “Most of the Houses Had Lost their Lights,” explaining what fate has handed her. These are female equals to Hardcastle’s mythical male figures, Antigones who’ve been let down but hurl themselves at life regardless, and they feel very real.

  Like Raymond Carver’s stories, these can be darkly funny, and they’re often as cleanly written. Moments of straightforward description can be startlingly powerful (the ending of “Bandits,” for instance, is an exceptional twist). Though the portmanteau words (“curtaincloth,” “bridgebroke”) are sometimes forced, the dialogue is brusque and natural. Some of the story titles are excellent, and the book’s title itself would benefit from Hardcastle’s trick of throwing in archaic words or turns of phrase. This could be grating in different hands, but it works, again because of the sense of timelessness it creates. “One We Could Stand to Lose,” about an aging clerk who runs a still in the hotel basement, evocatively pictures the way “[l]iquids rippled where they were flasked and bottled.” Sons try to live up to fathers. Lovers try to hold on. Siblings try to save each other. Old stories, all made fresh through their language and honesty.

  Kevin Hardcastle is already one to watch. His stories have been widely published in magazines, and he has twice been a finalist for the Journey Prize. His first novel will be out next year, and it’s sure to be strong. This is a dextrous writer with unflinching vision. This book’s gift is in constructing a museum of hard lives, letting us circle them like excavated marble statues, taking us close enough to see all their mutilation, power, and rough beauty.

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• The Globe and Mail
  https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/review-kevin-hardcastles-in-the-cage-is-a-fierce-and-beautiful-novel/article36275972/
  Word count: 1000

  Review: Kevin Hardcastle’s In the Cage is a fierce and beautiful novel
  Open this photo in gallery:

  Kevin Hardcastle’s book In the Cage has a language that is fundamentally based in movement.

  Katrina Afonso
  J.R. McCONVEY
  Special to The Globe and Mail
  Published September 15, 2017
  Updated September 15, 2017

  Title
  In the Cage
  Author
  Kevin Hardcastle
  Genre
  Fiction
  Publisher
  Biblioasis
  Pages
  309
  Price
  $19.95

  Some people like a fight. Take the millions who recently paid a hundred bucks a pop to watch the boxer Floyd Mayweather wallop Conor McGregor, a mixed martial artist. Or there's Daniel, the protagonist of Kevin Hardcastle's In the Cage, who needs a fight like some need prayer: as a calming agent, a lifeline.

  Daniel is a retired cage fighter fallen on hard times, trying to support his family in Ontario's Simcoe County. He's got limited options for work and a connection to rural crime that makes for low-hanging but poisonous fruit.

  The novel tells Daniel's story in three overlapping spheres: At home with his wife, Sarah, and their 12-year-old daughter, Madelyn; among a gang of dealers and thugs he's known for years; and at the gym, where he trains, punishing heavy bags and flattening opponents. Together, they make for a stark, detailed portrait of a particular social and cultural setting – although, interestingly, specific geographical locations are rarely named.

  Hardcastle works in a noirish, folkloric mode that draws on Cormac McCarthy, Alistair MacLeod and Breaking Bad. He's noted his fondness for the American writer Donald Ray Pollock, and shares thematic territory and a taste for blood with fellow Toronto author Andrew F. Sullivan. Descriptions of his work tend to use the language of a weigh-in. "Taut" is a favourite, as is "muscular."

  There's something of those qualities in the strength of his prose, but both words imply a rigidity that does a disservice to Hardcastle's technical grace. The novel's language is fundamentally based in movement. The fight scenes are highlights, especially an exhilarating, mid-book sparring match between Daniel and his training partner, Jung Woo: "Jung Woo pushed forward but Daniel would not give and then he came untethered and drilled the Korean with hooks and an off-angle uppercut that sent the man sideways with his legs stiff and his glove drawing in the air as it came up late to block. They each ate the other man's right hand as the buzzer rang to call the round."

  Yet there are many smaller, gentler gestures – a hand laid on a shoulder, a wine glass moved just so – that carry as much weight in the larger choreography. Hardcastle's sentences are clean and hard, but the combinations are complex and deliberately crafted. Imagine the slow wrapping of a fist, knuckle by knuckle, and you get a sense of how Hardcastle tightens his narrative with a precision physics that's grim, hypnotic, sometimes heartbreaking, always humane.

  In the stories from his Trillium Book Award-winning debut collection, Debris, Hardcastle's stylistic tics could occasionally feel intrusive. There's some of that here, a few too many "that man"s in too few pages, a couple spots begging for a comma. In general, though, the novel digests his epic cadences more easily than the short fiction, and the distinguishing marks of his style help cast a biblical mood. There is vivid description of the Ontario landscape and of the suburban industrial zones where unsavoury characters conduct lethal bids for control of the local drug trade. There's dialogue that crackles with apocalyptic threat.

  The success of this McCarthyan scope, the existential spectrum of light and darkness in the book, is also reason to avoid casting Hardcastle strictly as a social realist. In media materials, much is made of the novel's focus on the rural poor and its grounding in Simcoe County, where Hardcastle grew up. Like Steinbeck, though, Hardcastle's realism reaches beyond spokesmanship, to cosmic truths, mythic forms – and, sometimes, harsh extremes. If anything, his sole pulled punch is how the book's perspective sometimes leans too far toward Sarah's idealized version of Daniel, even though it recognizes the schism in him early on. For all that man's heart and all his plight, he's no working-class hero; he's bound to violence and his restless limbs have deadly potential.

  We empathize with Daniel, though, because of those little movements and moments, especially the ones he shares with his daughter – a relationship that feels genuine and poignant. Likewise, the scenes involving Sarah, Jung Woo and his older friend, Murray, are filled with warmth and care.

  These tender passages are contrasted with underworld scenes that increase in pitch and intensity until they rival anything from No Country for Old Men – there's even an Anton Chigurh-like psychopath to execute the bloodiest bits. The resulting rhythm winds up tension and propels the reader toward the grisly inevitability of the final pages. Though Hardcastle works in deep emotional territory, the novel reads like a thriller.

  In discussions of both pugilism and class, what's often missed is how the world contains many notions of beauty. Assumptions on these grounds can widen fault lines along geographical and social divides. Hardcastle shows us how, depending on where you stand, beauty can look much different than you might expect – but also ways in which the common beauty of small joys links us, and how cruelty is our undoing. Whether you like a fight or not, chances are, something in this novel will move you. In the Cage is a fierce, beautiful book.

  J.R. McConvey is a writer based in Toronto.
  Algonquin comic book creator and TV producer Jay Odjick responds to the idea that diversity in comic book storylines is to blame for falling sales. Odjick is the creator of Kagagi, a superhero comic book series and TV show

• Winnipeg Review
  http://winnipegreview.com/2017/09/in-the-cage-by-kevin-hardcastle/
  Word count: 894

  ‘In the Cage’ by Kevin Hardcastle
  Posted: September 25, 2017

  Book Reviews

  Reviewed by Andrew Woodrow-Butcher

  This new book from Kevin Hardcastle is a much-anticipated follow-up to his Trillium Award-winning 2016 short-fiction debut, Debris. Written before Debris but published subsequently, In the Cage revisits many of the themes of his other work, bringing us back to Hardcastle’s small-town, working-class, violently masculine world. Though In the Cage is well-crafted and suspenseful, it ultimately fails to satisfy because its propulsive focus on dramatic action overshadows character development, to a fault.

  The action revolves around Daniel, once a quite successful Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter who has given up the glamorous roving poverty of the fight circuit to settle into a less adventurous, more numbing poverty with his wife and daughter somewhere in rural Ontario. Hardcastle intersperses glimpses of family backstory with an involving chronicle of Daniel’s everyday: his work as a contractor, his slide into some unsavory and dangerous jobs for a local crime boss, and his discovery of a new MMA gym in town, where he can reclaim some of the visceral excitement of his earlier life.

  Unsurprisingly then, Hardcastle’s descriptions of violence, of injury, of bodies ruined by choice, by accident or by design are many and varied. At first, the play-by-play narration of Daniel’s fights is thrilling. And there is a pleasure in wincing through these scenes of bloody sport. But they begin to pale in comparison to the sadism of some of Daniel’s criminal colleagues, and the scenes of outright torture that appear later in the book take over the landscape of its imaginary. In the Cage is structured around the differences between these several types of violence: which ones are bearable, or chosen, which ones are acceptable, or a step too far. And the alternating bouts of adrenaline and serious injury that characterize the life of an MMA fighter, though they may seem traumatic from the outside, emerge as a metaphor for the daily grind of other kinds of subsistence work, where pleasure, pain, excitement and reward rarely balance, and always tip toward decline.

  Hardcastle’s prose style is artful, and though his characters are plainspoken, the craft of his writing, his playful and sharp use of language is very much in evidence. In the Cage also showcases the mastery of atmospheric suspense that was so much a part of the success of Debris as well. While the MMA violence operates partly as metaphor, the criminal violence of In the Cage generates the tense tone and high stakes that propel us through this book.

  But despite Hardcastle’s clear talents, In the Cage disappoints overall. For all that the scarred, damaged body of his protagonist seems to record his many kinds of struggle, whatever interior life Daniel may have is left to our imagination. Although we see Daniel in shallow conversations with his wife, his colleagues, his daughter, Hardcastle does not provide much of a window into his or their thoughts or motivations. In a shorter piece, this type of omission might work well: a snapshot, a single scene might benefit from such ambiguity. But in the almost 300 pages that hinge on this central figure, we are left without having gotten to know Daniel, and as a result the book at times reads like pantomime. This is only compounded by the lengthy, descriptive passages that detail the MMA fighting. Though at the beginning these provide a wonderfully kinetic entry-point to the action, as the book progresses the catalogue of each successive twist and flexion becomes more plodding than striking. For all that Hardcastle’s dramatic, suspenseful scenario is enjoyable, the ways in which his protagonist and his town are troubled are left largely under-explored.

  As in Debris, Hardcastle focuses on hetero-masculinity to a point of notable exclusion. Perhaps as a result of the novel’s concern with action over interiority, the two principal female characters, Sarah and Madelyn – Daniel’s wife and daughter – come across as tired types rather than well-rounded personages. Sarah and Madelyn are both very smart, patient, forgiving characters, but they are sympathetic to the point of bland. MMA is, as far as we know, the only thing that Daniel has an enthusiasm for; we learn that he gave it up because when Madelyn came down with pneumonia, Sarah demanded that he come home and settle down. As tensions mount with his criminal associates, Daniel’s worry for the safety of these two drives his actions and our feelings of suspense; they are eventually touched by the vicious violence that has hung over the whole novel. In the Cage creates a whole world, and in this world women appear within a domestic sphere almost entirely, and function only as limits to, or victims of, male adventure.

  High stakes and constant tension should make this book a page-turner. But while it is generally engaging, and leverages many of Hardcastle’s strengths, this novel-length work also amplifies some of the serious shortcomings of his earlier fiction. In the Cage is a grisly story, propelled by violence and fear, and not much else.

  Biblioasis | 291 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1771961479
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• ZYZZYVA
  http://www.zyzzyva.org/2017/12/27/violence-and-consequences-on-the-fringes-of-society-in-the-cage-by-kevin-hardcastle/
  Word count: 804

  QUOTE:
  Hardcastle drops the rural noir genre into the ring of literary fiction.
  What’s perhaps most notable about In the Cage is its unflinching look at the destructiveness of violence.
  Genre fiction is often criticized for its recurring tropes and boilerplate plots, but Kevin Hardcastle’s novel proves otherwise. In the Cage is both fresh and haunting. It is a novel of grace and brutality, and the balance between them.

  Violence and Consequences on the Fringes of Society: ‘In the Cage’ by Kevin Hardcastle
  by Bjorn Svendsen
  Posted on December 27, 2017

  In the CageWith In the Cage (309 pages; Biblioasis), Kevin Hardcastle drops the rural noir genre into the ring of literary fiction. Hardcastle, winner of the Trillium Book Award and ReLit Award for Short Fiction, has created a novel where crime fiction and the literary tradition occupy the same space. In the Cage tells the story of conflicted characters with complex relationships navigating violence and its consequences against the morally gray backdrop of remote Saskatchewan.

  Daniel is a caring but stoic husband and father whose mixed martial arts career ended twelve years earlier with a detached retina. He and his wife now live in near-poverty with their daughter. Unable to find steady work, Daniel moonlights as hired muscle for a local gangster. When a money collection gig turns more brutal than delivering one-two punches, Daniel grapples with the true cost of the path he’s chosen to provide for his family. Returning to the gym gives him distance and sanctuary from his problems, but his time spent training is overshadowed by the presence of a chilling, pale-eyed villain whose sadism intimidates even the most hardened criminals.

  What’s perhaps most notable about In the Cage is its unflinching look at the destructiveness of violence. Hardcastle’s descriptions are clinical yet shocking. A shotgun blast erupts and “One part of the man flew skewered with rib-bone.” Punches flatten noses. A throat is slashed and “it seemed like all he had in him had exited the body through that cut.” Hardcastle’s descriptions are free of gusto and provide just enough detail for them to act like a chokehold on the reader.

  The author is clearly knowledgeable in the area of mixed martial arts. During Daniel’s training and fight scenes, the various punches, kicks, and submission holds are elaborated on with enough sensory detail that even readers unfamiliar with blood sport will be able to feel them. These sequences serve double duty, providing just as much insight into the characters as into their fighting ability. Daniel’s interior and the expression of his will are narrated with deceivingly simple, Hemingway-esque prose. “Blood and sweat sprayed the canvas and their feet atop it,” for example, or when Daniel kicks a heavy bag in his basement, Hardcastle describes the sound like “a nail being hammered into the hollows of the place.”

  The remote Canadian setting evokes the hardships of rural, working-class life. Daniel and his family live in a perpetually cold, blue-collar necropolis of rust and poverty. His worksite is, “Acre upon acre of frozen ground with muddied swaths in the white.” And in my favorite line of the novel, we read, “There he thumped the gas pedal and the tires threw broken chips of brittle tarmac as he went townward through cold and lightless country.” With passages such as these, one not only feels the mood of desolation but also a hushed metaphysical horror akin to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

  Apart from the carnage, In the Cage is also a touching, multi-generational reflection on family values. Some of the best scenes feature Daniel’s elderly neighbors, Murray and Ella. Their kindness and moral expectations serve as prescient warnings to Daniel in a place where poor choices are paid for dearly. Even so, readers are likely to sense Daniel won’t heed his neighbors’ warnings, and that the novel’s bloody denouement will not end with a knockout.

  Genre fiction is often criticized for its recurring tropes and boilerplate plots, but Kevin Hardcastle’s novel proves otherwise. In the Cage is both fresh and haunting. It is a novel of grace and brutality, and the balance between them.
  This entry was posted in Book Reviews and tagged action genre, biblioasis, book review, Canada, fiction, in the cage, kevin hardcastle, literary fiction, martial arts, neo-noir, noir. Bookmark the permalink.
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• Hamilton Review of Books
  http://hamiltonreviewofbooks.com/sally-cooper-reviews-kevin-hardcastles-in-the-cage/
  Word count: 812

  A Review of Kevin Hardcastle's In the Cage

  Review by Sally Cooper

  Kevin Hardcastle has trained in various Martial Arts such as Karate, Muay Thai and Boxing. He is the author of the story collection, Debris, which won the 2016 Trillium and ReLit Awards. In his first novel, In the Cage, Hardcastle crafts a grueling portrait of the survival efforts of Daniel, a MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fighter, with the attention to detail inherent to any trade performed by a skilled professional.

  In the Cage weaves Daniel’s attempts to extricate himself from criminal elements and make an honest living while facing increasing debt and difficulty. Set in an unnamed rural community in Ontario, near a First Nation, In the Cage, strives to provide an immersive experience of the challenges of living in a climate of decreasing opportunity.

  Daniel is a relentlessly skilled fighter, his talents valued by a local drug gang in need of an enforcer. Yet when Daniel brings the ethics of the ring to his criminal work, the gang members relieve him of any hope that the others will adhere to his code, so he soon leaves them behind.

  Daniel’s efforts to take on legitimate work in construction provide diminishing returns, leading him to sniff out a local gym where he trains in the afternoons. When the work dries up in winter, Daniel, who lacks seniority, is laid off. After a long, fruitless job search, he determines to provide for his family using his skills in the ring alone.

  Hardcastle’s sentences land like bricks. His language approaches the poetic when Daniel fights, whether in training or in a publicized fight: “More meat on him than Daniel had seen the coach carry before. Underneath it all his bones were yet like iron.” In the ring, the men are hyper-aware of each other’s physicality, of where their bodies hold strength, of their potential as an opponent. Hardcastle uses language both specific and plain, calling on syntax to echo the body’s rhythms in the ring. The language makes real the force of engagement while withholding any glory beyond that of a fight well-fought.

  Of note, too, is how Hardcastle employs archaic and blended words, in the vein of Cormac McCarthy, another chronicler of rural savagery in a land of few options. Even ordinary moments, Hardcastle renders solemn: “Daniel showered and he stood in the bedroom for some time before he dropped the towel and let the air at his nethers.” While his choice of words can have a distancing effect, Hardcastle is also universalizing the characters’ lives, adding an epic element to their struggles, and malice to those who, like Tarbell, menace outside of a code, whose violence exceeds all efforts of those who wish to control it or wield it as a tool.

  Hardcastle writes of a rural existence that other writers caricature or wash over with humour or sentimentality. Daniel and Sarah face a hard grind as they struggle to move out from under their debts while keeping it honest. Forces from without (the gangs striving to manipulate Daniel back into their fold) and from within (the scars of a life underpinned by violence and few options) make the moments of love between the couple and shared with their daughter all the more tender. The dance Daniel and Sarah perform as they shape their daily existence is every bit as intricate and caringly described as the fighters’ encounters in the cage.

  While presented mainly from Daniel’s perspective, In the Cage does roam into others’ points of view, such as those of Sarah and local gangsters, Clayton and Wallace. Hardcastle employs these perspective shifts intuitively while spending the bulk of his time with Daniel. Indeed, it is a feat that Hardcastle so convincingly takes the reader inside this damaged, profound character. Not surprisingly, Daniel doles his words out sparingly, yet his inner life sings off the page, especially in his most ferocious, least outwardly verbal moments: “Someone broke a full beer bottle over Daniel’s head and he did not feel it and inside of a minute there were six men down and all but one were bleeding from the mouth or nose or eyes. All but one, who lay facedown over an upturned table, his shoulderjoint twisted out of the socket so that the whole arm hung stretched and simian at his side.”

  In the Cage takes time to build, lingering on Daniel’s training and not skimping on the fights. Yet once it gains momentum, it holds steady, leading to a brutal climax too exciting to put down. Uncommon in its approach to violence and love, In the Cage is a brawny debut novel that stares down the hardships of the rural poor.

• I've Read This
  https://ivereadthis.com/2017/10/03/book-review-in-the-cage-by-kevin-hardcastle/
  Word count: 831

  Book Review: In the Cage by Kevin Hardcastle

  Smokey pulls no punches when it comes to posing for this picture
  Date: October 3, 2017Author: annelogan17 13 Comments

  In the past few years I’ve read a handful of books that could be labelled as ‘manly man literary books’. This is of course my highly scientific name for them, which I’m sure will catch on any minute now. What makes these books unique is the writing style which is typically very sparse and straightforward (no flowery language here folks!) and the action, which is usually violent but not gratuitous. Craig Davidson’s Cataract City, and D.W. Wilson’s Ballistics are two perfect examples of this genre, and Kevin Hardcastle‘s debut novel In the Cage is an exceptional addition to this budding category of literature.

  It’s a bit strange that I liked this book so much because it deals with subject matter I don’t care for. It features a young man named Daniel who is a retired MMA (mixed martial arts) fighter, forced out of competing too early because of an injury. Living in a small rural town in Ontario he struggles to find work as he has a wife and child at home, but he falls in and out of work with a local gangster who seems to be able to offer the only dependable (albeit dangerous) and well paying job in the area. I’m not a fan of watching professional fighting for a multitude of reasons, and this book includes lots of fighting references; training for fights, professional fights, violent fights breaking out between hot-headed men, etc, but Hardcastle describes these bouts almost as a dance, with lots of technical know-how and observation so I actually found these descriptions interesting.
  Kevin Hardcastle-even the author’s name sounds bad-ass!

  The language of the book is what I liked the most. A few examples of how tight each sentence is:

  “In the dark and pisswet alleyway Daniel stood under one meagre light” (p. 12 of ARC);

  “He sat in his gitch on the edge of the couch cushions” (p. 76 of ARC);

  “The pads of his feet were raw and they spoke to him about it on the walk” (p. 116 of ARC).

  When the book you are reading uses the word ‘gitch’, you know the author ain’t foolin’ around. In fact, some of the sentences sound like they’re almost missing a word or two, to the point they sounded grammatically incorrect. They could be for all I know, but it doesn’t really matter in the end because this was clearly a stylistic decision, not a mistake. Plus, the book was published by Biblioasis, a well-known and reputable publisher, so we know the book received a proper edit and approval by a proofreader, which is why I think this is just a case of me not being 100% up on my rules of grammar.

  The ending of this book really blew me away, I felt myself release a big exhale when I turned the last page, and I could hardly believe what I had just read. Believe me, Hardcastle just GOES for it, alliances to certain characters be damned! My only quibble with this book would be the characterization of Daniel’s wife Sarah. She is a strong woman, fearless really, and the amount of shit she puts up with is unbelievable. She stands up (more than once) to the small-town criminals that Daniel falls in with, and although I’m sure men WISH a woman like that existed, I’m not sure I’ll ever meet one. Hopefully, my husband never does either.

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  BiblioasisBook Reviewbookscan-litFictionIn the CageKevin Hardcastleliterary fictionmanly-man books
  Published by annelogan17

  I worked in the Canadian publishing industry for 7 years, and loved every minute of it. Now that my day job no longer involves books, I wanted to find a way to connect with other readers and publishing professionals. I read a lot, and I don’t want to keep my opinions to myself, so people send me books, and I review them. View all posts by annelogan17

• Quill and Quire
  https://quillandquire.com/review/in-the-cage/
  Word count: 622

  In the Cage

  by Kevin Hardcastle

  BIB01 In the Ring PRINT.indd
  Kevin Hardcastle’s debut novel demonstrates that the violent depredations dramatized in the fiction of Cormac McCarthy are not confined to the Texas–Mexico border: rural Canada works just fine as a locale. In the Cage finds its protagonist, Daniel, stoically trying to eke out an existence for himself, his wife, Sarah, who works the night shift at the local old folks’ home, and their 11-year-old daughter. Daniel was once a fearsome mixed-martial-arts cage fighter, but a career-ending injury has reduced him to working half-days as a welder and supplementing his income as muscle for a local drug kingpin and his crew, which not incidentally includes the drug lord’s violent and sullen nephew, Tarbell.

  In sparse, understated prose, Hardcastle depicts Daniel’s slide into the murkier areas of his conscience and bloodier areas of work. After his job affords him a close-up brush with murder, Daniel finds it hard to sleep and dulls the psychic pain with bottle after bottle of beer. Following a series of setbacks, and much to his wife’s chagrin, Daniel embarks on an unlikely comeback in the MMA cage.

  In a landscape dominated by weed, beer, oxycontin, bikers, and guns, violence is as inevitable as another round of whiskies at the bar. But rather than employ a commonplace, Tarantinoesque approach juxtaposing the violence with humour or camp, Hardcastle provides no adornments. His economical writing resembles dispatches from a war zone: “They were not five feet out into the lot before the shotgun bellowed. Daniel sunk to his haunches and went sideways toward the building. Streak of muzzle-fire against the black. Dubeau spun forty-five degrees and as he turned there were pieces of him flung out in the open air.”

  Hardcastle spends rather too much time on Daniel’s strenuous MMA training sessions and not enough on backstory. There is focus and energy in Daniel’s quiet rage, but there are only passing allusions to the relationship with his father that helped put him on the road to the socioeconomic underclass. When Tarbell comes after Sarah, it sets the stage for Daniel’s revenge and an anticipated conflagration at the climax. In Hardcastle’s rugged universe, however, there are no winners, and the cage of the mind proves much more difficult to navigate than the one in which the professional fighters ply their trade.

  Reviewer: Stephen Knight

  Publisher: Biblioasis
  DETAILS

  Price: $19.95

  Page Count: 256 pp

  Format: Paper

  ISBN: 978-1-77196-147-9

  Released: Sept.

  Issue Date: September 2017

  Categories: Fiction: Novels

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• Open Book
  http://open-book.ca/News/Kevin-Hardcastle-author-of-hotly-anticipated-novel-In-the-Cage-on-mornings-heroes-and-Coke-Zero
  Word count: 1077

  Kevin Hardcastle, author of hotly anticipated novel In the Cage, on mornings, heroes, and Coke Zero
  Date
  September 14, 2017
  Share this post
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  Proust Questionnaire Kevin Hardcastle

  Kevin Hardcastle

  Kevin Hardcastle's Cormac McCarthy-esque brand of rural noir has been making waves in the Canadian literary scene since he first began publishing short stories in journals, earning a Journey Prize nomination in the process and leading to his Trillium Book Award-winning collection, Debris. He doubles down on his signature gritty, sparse, and powerful aesthetic in his debut novel, In the Cage (Biblioasis).

  In The Cage follows Daniel, a promising MMA fighter whose life and career are derailed by a brutal injury. Out of options in his impoverished hometown, he finds himself moonlighting as an enforcer for a former friend, now a shady figure in the town's criminal underbelly. Daniel tries to protect his wife and daughter from the rising darkness in his life, but violence seems to breed and multiply, until survival itself is in question.

  We're thrilled to talk to Kevin today as part of our version of the Proust Questionnaire, the famous personality-centric quiz that lets us get to know writers on a personal level. Kevin tells us about what he spent his prize money on, being internet-tall, and why you don't need to talk to him about Coke Zero.

  Kevin also happens to be part of the small and mighty Open Book team as our Assistant Editor (no, he didn't write this intro).
  What is your dream of happiness?

  To be able to write and not have to work a shitty job for some shitty boss again. To not have to see the front-side of 11:00am if I can help it.
  Where would you like to live?

  I always get called "Toronto author Kevin Hardcastle," but I’m not from Toronto. I chose to live here after coming here for university, and I will always consider it home. That being said, I’d like to spend some time in other cities during my career, if I can figure out a way to fund such things.
  What qualities do you admire most in a man?

  Reliability, integrity, and an understanding of how tough they are or aren’t, and behaving accordingly as a result.
  What qualities do you admire most in a woman?

  The level of ferocity and toughness that men don’t have.
  What is your chief characteristic?

  The ability to not give too much of a shit about things that would get in the way of doing what I need to do.
  What is your principal fault?

  I often think what is right is right, even if that line can move. I also tend to go on…
  What is your greatest extravagance?

  The amount of beer and chicken wings I’ve bought with my dwindling prize monies.
  What faults in others are you most tolerant of?

  Anger, and flaws that manifest from damage or trauma.
  What do you value most about your friends?

  Loyalty and the ability to put up with my ravings.
  What characteristic do you dislike most in others?

  Arrogance, hubris, wealth.
  What characteristic do you dislike most in yourself?

  I talk too much instead of listening sometimes, and, while not a hobbit, I would like to be as tall as I sound on the internet.
  What is your favourite virtue?

  Empathy, unselfishness.
  What would you like to be?

  UFC Heavyweight Champ. Otherwise, a working, professional writer.
  What historical figure do you admire the most?

  Tim Riggins.
  What character in history do you most dislike?

  Joffrey Baratheon.
  Who are your favourite prose authors?

  Cormac McCarthy, Alistair MacLeod, Daniel Woodrell, Donald Ray Pollock, Ernest Hemingway.
  Who are your heroes in real life?

  My mum and dad. Poor people and women and marginalized people who get out of bed everyday and try to make a life of it.
  Who is your favourite musician?

  Nirvana.
  What is your favourite food?

  Beer.
  What is your favourite drink?

  Beer and Coke Zero (I’ve heard all this talk about Coke Zero being discontinued. This is false. Stop telling me this. It has switched to some Coke Zero Sugar thing that takes pretty much the same. But, if they do take away my Coke Zero, I will end up on the news).
  What is it you most dislike?

  The especially wealthy and what they’ve done to the rest of us.
  What natural talent would you most like to possess?

  To be able to sing like Chris Cornell, or to be able to have footwork like Dominic Cruz or Conor McGregor and the instincts of vintage Anderson Silva. For supernatural talent, Zack Morris Timeout, hands down.
  How do you want to die?

  Like Tristan Ludlow.
  What is your current state of mind?

  I am currently in a state of anticipation and getting-readiness for this novel I’ve written that has just been released. I’m not feeling the nerves too much, but I am always a little restless in thinking of what to do with the latest work, and how to be better with the next thing I’m working on.
  What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?

  The two books I’ve done. And all of the work that it took to make them happen, and all of the stories I wrote over the years that did not suck.
  What is your motto?

  Believe in your dreams.

  _______________________

  Kevin Hardcastle is a fiction writer from Simcoe County, Ontario. His short stories have been published in journals and anthologies internationally, including The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, The New Quarterly, Joyland, Shenandoah, The Walrus, The Journey Prize Stories 24 & 26, Best Canadian Stories 15, and Internazionale. Hardcastle’s debut short story collection, Debris won the 2016 Trillium Book Award, the 2016 ReLit Award for Short Fiction, was runner-up for the 2016 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and was a finalist for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize.

• The Star
  https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/reviews/2017/09/15/kevin-hardcastle-doesnt-let-the-action-get-away-from-him-in-in-the-cage.html
  Word count: 919

  Kevin Hardcastle doesn't let the action get away from him in In the Cage

  Saga of lowered expectations is told in short, action-based scenes that forgo many devices prevalent in contemporary CanLit.
  By James GraingerSpecial to the Star
  Fri., Sept. 15, 2017
  In the Cage - Kevin Hardcastle

  There’s a line early in Kevin Hardcastle’s impressive debut novel that sums up an emerging cultural ethos that several Canadian authors have begun to explore in their fiction. “It all just sort of got away from me,” Daniel, the protagonist of In the Cage, explains to his wife. “I didn’t see it coming.” The repetition of “it” is telling, the vague pronoun a stand-in for Daniel’s inchoate and failed efforts at bettering himself.

  Daniel joins the gallery of disaffected working-class men featured in the recent works of Craig Davidson (Cataract City), Matt Lennox (Knucklehead) and Andrew Sullivan (Waste), to name a few. In these novels, set in Canada’s version of the Rust Belt, violence is less a matter of literary metaphor than the lived language of a life steeped in boredom, petty crime and poorly paid, short-term employment. Men fight because they’re bored, broke and desperate and, unlike in the fiction of such American heavyweights as Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy, the violence is neither poetic nor redemptive.

  In the Cage fulfils the promise of its title by dropping readers straight into the world of illegal and low-tiered Mixed Martial Arts cage matches that passes for entertainment in bars, casinos, barns, First Nations and warehouses across the country. Daniel, a fighter born into the drudging poverty of rural life, is working his way up the ranks of this travelling bloodbath in hopes of one day winning a shot at the title when an eye injury ends his career.

  After this introductory section, we find Daniel, now returned to his hometown, working as a hired goon for a gangster mired in a turf war with the local bike gang. The violence ratchets up when the gangster buses in his psychotic nephew to settle a few scores, forcing Daniel to choose between loyalty to his boss or his wife Sarah and their daughter.

  He chooses the latter, resigning himself to the boredom and economic precariousness of the welding trade. When a friend from the fight circuit opens a gym in the town, Daniel is slowly drawn back into his old life as a fighter.

  Hardcastle tells this saga of lowered expectations in short, action-based (and often dialogue-heavy) scenes that forgo the internalized monologues, commentary and descriptive passages so prevalent in contemporary CanLit. The effect is to firmly anchor the action in a culture and an economy that negates the inner life and the ability to reflect upon and change the course of one’s actions. It also bestows upon the novel’s many fights, staged and spontaneous, and scenes of violence a thrilling immediacy.

  This is not to say that Hardcastle’s style is invisible. When the action demands, he successfully relocates the rolling, Biblical sentences pioneered by Hemingway, Faulkner and McCarthy to his small-town Ontario milieu, and the dialogue is as punchy as Elmore Leonard’s, though deliberately less comic.

  Hardcastle has a talent for sketching believable but noir-tinged criminal types with a few quick details and gestures. He is also not above disorienting the reader with bizarre, brutal imagery: a bodyguard’s skin is described as having the “boiled, pink hue of a man full with bought testosterone,” while the loser of a vicious bar brawl is left with a shoulder joint “twisted out of the socket so that the whole arm hung stretched and simian at his side.”
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  Only one note in the novel doesn’t quite ring true: Daniel’s unflagging gentleness with and empathy for Sarah and their daughter. No matter how hard their hard times, Daniel and Sarah remain mutually supportive spouses and concerned parents.

  The sad truth, revealed by far too many headlines, is that violent men such as Daniel, their lives in full free fall, often take down with them the ones they love the most (a dynamic Russell Banks’s brilliantly dissects in his novel of small-town violence, Affliction). Though it becomes clear as the novel progresses that Daniel is that rare man who can protect his better self from the violence and chaos surrounding him, a few signs of inevitable domestic tension would have generated more empathy for Daniel, not less.

  It’s a minor complaint: Hardcastle is a writer to watch.

  James Grainger is the author of Harmless.

• Globe and Mail Online
  https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/review-new-short-fiction-by-kevin-hardcastle-and-olive-senior/article26950247/?cmpid=rss1
  Word count: 673

  QUOTE:
  the author manages to plumb the psychological depths of a group of marginal characters by way of a minimal style that rigorously strips away anything extraneous, leaving only what is essential.

  What is essential, in Hardcastle's vision, is raw and stinging and frequently drenched in violence.

  New books by Kevin Hardcastle and Olive Senior exist on opposite ends of the spectrum
  Open this photo in gallery:
  Kevin Hardcastle

  STEVE W. BEATTIE
  SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
  PUBLISHED OCTOBER 23, 2015
  UPDATED MARCH 25, 2017
  Debris

  By Kevin Hardcastle

  Biblioasis, 228 pages, $19.95

  The Pain Tree

  By Olive Senior

  Cormorant, 194 pages, $22.95

  To begin to understand how Kevin Hardcastle's stylistic technique carries much of the force and effect in his stories, consider the way the author deploys compound words. Not everyday compounds, though he uses these as well (the word "everyday" itself appears in Hardcastle's first collection, though there is little else that is commonplace about the book's 11 stories). Rather, Hardcastle confronts his reader with enjambed syntax that feels as though it has been wrenched bodily out of his backwoods country setting. "They'd an early spring thaw," Hardcastle writes in The Rope, "and the sidewalks and streets in town were all sand and roadgrit." Or the opening line from the title story: "Come pale morning the old woman found a greycoat squirrel drifting dead in the swimming pool waters." Or this, from Old Man Marchuk: "They'd not heard the squelching of bootfalls in the thawmud near the barn."

  The language Hardcastle employs throughout these stories is not precisely vernacular, and it only appears to reflect the cadence of natural speech. But compounds such as "roadgrit," "greycoat" and "thawmud" – along with the calculated use of contractions, the almost poetic construction "come pale morning," and the aggressive specificity of "squelching" – are precise and evocative, immediately locating a reader in a milieu without recourse to wasted verbiage or overwrought description. Hardcastle has internalized the lessons of Elmore Leonard and Ernest Hemingway – writers who are frequently (and erroneously) praised for their fidelity to the rhythms of natural speech and dialect. In each case, what careless readers dismiss as naturalistic writing is in fact among the most highly stylized prose around. And the most difficult to pull off.

  The hardest thing for a writer to achieve is to make the prose appear effortless. In his well-known rules for crafting fiction, Leonard sums up his approach in one handy axiom: "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." Hardcastle's prose, to his credit, never sounds like writing. Instead, the author manages to plumb the psychological depths of a group of marginal characters by way of a minimal style that rigorously strips away anything extraneous, leaving only what is essential.

  What is essential, in Hardcastle's vision, is raw and stinging and frequently drenched in violence. Shape of a Sitting Man begins with a revenge killing, and follows the gunman as he flees the scene of the crime. Bandits focuses on the exploits of a family of thieves who make their living crossing the frozen ice on motorized sleds to rob outpost liquor stores.

  That story ends with a scene in which a sled crashes through the ice; sympathetic readers will find in this an archetypal CanLit moment, others might well find it clichéd. What rescues the story, as always, is Hardcastle's language, which is direct and visceral, but tinged with empathy for his characters, all of whom strive for meaning while trapped in a universe that seems bent on denying it. "Everything in the world was evil," thinks one of the travelling salesmen in Hunted by Coyotes. "All the dogs were trying to kill us." As a motivating principle, this may seem frankly desperate; it is Hardcastle's talent as a stylist that pulls these stories out of the realm of despair and elevates them to something more vibrant and satisfying.

• Quill & Quire Online
  https://quillandquire.com/review/debris/
  Word count: 534

  QUOTE:
  collection to savour.

  ★Debris
  by Kevin Hardcastle

  With his debut story collection, Toronto writer Kevin Hardcastle introduces readers to a world that may appear as foreign as any imagined science-fiction or fantasy milieu. That he renders this world so strongly – simultaneously immersive and alienating – is just one of the strengths of this impressive work.

  indexThe stories in Debris take place, mainly, in largely anonymous rural settings: farms and forests, gravel pits and small towns. In Hardcastle’s hands, these locales form a world of desperation, violence, poverty, and helplessness, populated by thieves and police officers, door-to-door salesmen and factory workers. Hardcastle’s skill as a storyteller lies in never treating the setting or the characters as generic types. Each story is a fully realized world – as rich as it is bleak, the characters powerfully and carefuly drawn.

  In “Old Man Marchuk,” for example, a young RCMP officer named Hoye, newly deployed to a tiny Alberta detachment, arrests the eponymous character after the old man chases down and shoots two men. “You shot those men?” “They were robbin’ me.” “Your farm is fuckin’ three miles thataway.” The arrest galvanizes the town, with Hoye’s actions disturbing the long-held tolerance for the law-breaking Marchuk family, and pitting locals against outsiders.

  But it’s not quite that simple. In Hardcastle’s stories, nothing ever is.

  The focus shifts to the other side of the law in “Bandits,” as Hardcastle follows the ebbing dynamics among a criminal family that specializes in snowmobiling over frozen lakes to steal liquor from package stores after hours. While the criminality – and the fates of the family members – forms the spine of the story, its heart is in the delicate interpersonal details threaded through the narrative, moments so understated they would be easy to miss, their import becoming clear only as the story progresses.

  For a writer who seems to specialize in oversized gestures – bar fights, stabbings, shootings, vandalism, robberies, furious sex – Hardcastle’s greatest strength is the subtlety of his storytelling. The parsed obliqueness of the pieces in Debris, and the surface taciturnity of the characters, reads like a blend of Raymond Carver and Elmore Leonard. Thankfully, Hardcastle also captures the depth of both writers: dialogue gracefully loaded with subtext, glances rich in significance, the deceptively simple nature of the action. These are stories that demand close readings, with attention paid to every word, every gesture.

  These are also stories that benefit from isolation. While the temptation to read Debris from cover to cover is understandable, the stories are better served by slower consumption. The oppressiveness of the individual narratives and the bleak worldview extended throughout the whole of the collection may become off-putting. Better to space them out, to allow each story to linger and build in the mind. Debris is a collection to savour.

  Reviewer: Robert J. Wiersema

  Publisher: Biblioasis

  DETAILS
  Price: $19.95

  Page Count: 200 pp

  Format: Paper

  ISBN: 978-1-77196-040-3

  Released: Sept.

  Issue Date: November 2015

  Categories: Fiction: Short

• Booklist Online
  https://www.booklistonline.com/
  Word count: 40

  “[Debris] has its own strong voice… smoothly connected by uncompromising settings and Hardcastle’s authentic, plainspoken country-noir voice, the 11 stories collected here will appeal to fans of gritty, back-country crime fiction, even those who typically shun short stories.”

• Winnipeg Review
  http://winnipegreview.com/2015/09/debris-by-kevin-hardcastle/
  Word count: 931

  QUOTE:
  Debris is a tense and complex book, the prose fluent but unassuming, the narratives often surprising in their construction. A succession of rural locales, of harsh weather conditions, and of characters in unfortunate circumstances characterize these eleven tales.

  ‘Debris’ by Kevin Hardcastle
  Posted: SEPTEMBER 18, 2015
  Book Reviews

  Debris coverReviewed by Andrew Woodrow-Butcher

  This first short-fiction collection from Toronto writer Kevin Hardcastle is concerned with people, places, and ideas that have fallen by the wayside. Debris is a tense and complex book, the prose fluent but unassuming, the narratives often surprising in their construction. A succession of rural locales, of harsh weather conditions, and of characters in unfortunate circumstances characterize these eleven tales.

  The book opens with its most memorable story, and one that is perhaps emblematic of the collection as a whole. “Old Man Marchuk,” like all of these pieces, is set somewhere poor, remote, and troubled. RCMP Constable Tom Hoye has newly arrived out west with his pregnant spouse, to a collection of distant townships as new to him as they are to the reader. When two guys break into the titular old man’s barn in an attempt to steal some ATVs, and Marchuk chases them for miles and almost kills them with his shotgun, we side with Hoye, who, shocked by this grim and disproportionate violence, arrests Marchuk. A vocal and perhaps dangerous contingent of locals sides with the old man, though, and undertakes a campaign of harassment against Hoye and his expecting wife. The story has quite a grip, but plot points are but a small part of Hardcastle’s masterful technique. The violent potential of the situation, the evident yet unintelligible desperation of the cast of characters, the disadvantages of not knowing the lay of the land: without resorting to tired narrative cadences, “Old Man Marchuk” offers all the pleasures of suspense fiction, in which every detail might equally be ominous or benign.

  All of the stories offer this same suspense, these same networks of desperation, these same violent potentials, in more or less metaphorized ways. In “Hunted by Coyotes,” for example, when Hardcastle blends the symbolic and the concrete, the human and the animal, the real and the fantastical with delightful unease, he is still working through these same concerns. Was sketchy door-to-door salesperson Squeak really being tailed by coyotes when he skipped off work early that night? How likely is it that our equally sketchy narrator was chased by coyotes to the top of a gazebo several towns later? When you see a rifle propped in the corner of a potential client’s living room, is that a threat? How will you eat and stay warm if you don’t keep scamming door to door? Though physical conflicts abound here, Debris also tackles the less tangible but equally vivid problems that haunt and hunt us: work, institutions, histories have their own subtle violence.

  These themes are rich, and Hardcastle mines them well. But the repetitive set-dressing of these stories – the eminently harsh summer or eminently harsh winter, the old small-town house, the unwell senior, the grudge, the drunks, the cop someone went to high school with – unfortunately blurs them together. I suspect the stories of Debris might display more distinctiveness and verve standing alone than they do read as a collection. While a debut is an opportunity to show range or diversity of tone or content, this book has forgone these in favour of an exclusive focus on the desperation – in particular the male desperation – borne of rural and small-town decline. Again and again Hardcastle returns to the figure of the angry or desperate, white, straight, working-class man. While Debris does not exactly glamourize or valourize this masculine type – on the contrary, these many depictions have plenty of nuance and insight – it nevertheless centers these experiences to the exclusion of others. In particular, the women of this book are often merely incidental or instrumental. They are sought after, cared for, protected, resented, invoked, but they are never what the book is about. Rather, Debris delineates a crisis of masculinity, set within a crisis of disappearing opportunities for community and livelihood. This is the singular, sepia world in which Hardcastle’s characters are trapped.

  The final two stories of the collection do feature female protagonists, and the first of these, “Debris,” is perhaps the best in the book. Here, rifle-toting, animal-loving, mystery-solving Emily Moore is a refreshing personality amidst all the male angst. Lots of debris has been caught in her swimming pool over the years. The story begins as she finds a dead squirrel and then a dead girl floating there during a spate of ominous weather. Hardcastle once more gives us grudges, vengeance, and a small community with a past, and again he weaves a network of tensions that terrify and delight. Emily Moore is a strong and engaging character in her own right, but as with Hoye’s wife and unborn child in “Old Man Marchuk,” the threat of male violence is the organizing force of the narrative, and as more dead girls turn up Emily begins to feel like she, despite her age, might be next. And so “Debris” crystallizes the themes of the collection perhaps even more than “Old Man Marchuk.” These are places, people, identities that have washed up, been left behind. No yellow brick road leads to an emerald-spangled exit: there’s no place but home. And rifles are as easy to come by here – perhaps easier than reconciliations.

• Malahat Review
  http://www.malahatreview.ca/reviews/194reviews_dopp.html
  Word count: 923

  QUOTE:
  Debris is a very fine collection, well-crafted and compelling, in which every single story rings true.

  Fiction Review by Jamie Dopp
  Kevin Hardcastle, Debris (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2015). Paperbound, 228 pp., $19.95.

  DebrisThe eleven stories in this debut collection are set mostly in the resource towns and countryside of the prairies. The characters tend to be scraping by on marginal work, petty (or more serious) crime, or to be the castoffs and victims—the debris—of the harsh economic and social environment. There is alcohol abuse, family dysfunction, violence, and the kind of exploitation that happens when people are reduced to fighting each other for scraps. The stories are told with careful precision, free of authorial judgment, in prose that reminded me of the understated lyricism of later Thomas McGuane or of David Adams Richards. As in McGuane or Richards, there are subtly redemptive qualities to the stories, but any redemption is hard-earned, and begins with a clear-eyed attention to the world that is.

  A good example is the first story, "Old Man Marchuk," which opens with an elderly farmer surprising two "city boys" who are trying to steal the ATVs from his barn. The farmer—the Marchuk of the title—fires on the thieves with his shotgun. The thieves try to get away in their truck but the farmer chases them down and shoots them again. The local RCMP constable, Tom Hoye, is sent to deal with the aftermath. Hoye arrests the old man and calls an ambulance for the gravely wounded young men. The moral complexity of the original incident plays out in the rest of the story. Marchuk is indignant at being charged for shooting the thieves. A small but vocal minority agree with him, as do a group of hick cousins who drive in from north-interior British Columbia to show support. Someone paints "Eastern pig" on Hoye's garage door and someone else spins doughnuts on his lawn. Hoye returns home to find his pregnant wife "on the porch steps with a pump shotgun on her lap." The implication is that the moral line between what Marchuk did and the potential actions of a more "decent" character is finer than might first appear. This is reinforced when, after he has testified at Marchuk's trial, Hoye returns to his house in the country. He puts on his Kevlar, loads his shotgun, and lays in a supply of whisky and beer. Then, to the sound of trilling crickets mixed with "distant reports of gunfire," he takes position outside to wait for what might happen next.

  What makes such stories ring true, of course, is not the "gritty" subject matter but quality of the writing. Like all of the stories in Debris, "Old Man Marchuk" is told in an economical prose with many fine details and a few subtle lyrical touches. Hardcastle crafts his own compounds ("thawmud," "ditchturf") and uses the occasional sentence fragment to present images more directly ("Shells in a line on the wooden planking beside her.") He also has a fine ear for the laconic dialogue of working-class, rural males. One of the strongest stories, I think, is "Bandits." It follows the doings of a hillbilly-like family of alcohol thieves that operates in winter on snowmobiles, from the point of view of the youngest son, who is torn between family loyalty and a desire to escape to a better life. The family outwits the RCMP until one night when the father and a brother are killed—perhaps executed by the police. The sudden evaporation of the family-gang suggests that, for all its outward appearance of strength, the power of a group like that—just as the power of a violent domineering individual like the father—is actually tenuous.

  "To Have To Wait" concerns two sons on their way to pick up their father from the criminal wing of a mental hospital. At a nearby gas station, the sons ask for directions, and when the local men make disparaging remarks about the inmates of the hospital they violently attack them. The sons then carry on and pick up their father who, it is implied, was committed for some act of violence himself. Finally, in a moving scene in the car, the father scolds his sons for fighting and forces them to promise that they won't do it again. The scene is one of a number in Debrisin which severely damaged people try to assert something like a "normal" loving bond with family members. In "The Rope," a son cares for his alcoholic mother while she, in her tragic way, tries to be a mother to him. Finally, two stories that particularly illustrate how people are forced to prey upon one another are "Montana Border" and "Hunted by Coyotes." The protagonist in "Montana Border" is a cage fighter—someone participating directly in an economy based on blood sport. The narrator of "Hunted by Coyotes" is a door-to-door salesman selling scam-like "hydro plans" to a variety of human "debris"—including disabled workers from the oil fields. In both cases, the characters’ persistent desires to find love is moving, despite their own failings and despite an economic system that, like the salesman's nightmarish coyotes, hunts the vulnerable as prey.

  In the acknowledgements, Hardcastle thanks a group of readers and instructors who encouraged him over the years to write "real, honest stories." The thanks are well-placed. Debris is a very fine collection, well-crafted and compelling, in which every single story rings true.

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