This volume contains: Hello, Monster – Annie’s Turn – Macaulay’s Mountain – Tour de Dave – The House Next Door – Summer of Stars – Rhoda’s Revenge – Fish Head – Rosemary Honey – The Haunted House of Cupcakes – Midnight in the Garden of Envy – The Black Beast of Margaree – Curse of the Crayfish – Whatever happened to Johnny Flowers? – Attach of the Treadmill – Gabriel Dubois – Code Yellow – Le Mort d’ArthurIn this collection, McLean’ themes continue to mature. He and Morley, his wife, age. Their children grow up and neighbours grow old. In “Le Morte D’Arthur” (a reference to Sir Thomas Malory’s famous Romance tales of King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and the Knights of the Round Table, first published in 1485), Arthur dies, and, as often happens, and Dave and his daughter Stephanie don’t get back in time to see him one last time. This gives Dave a moment to reminisce about Arthur’s habit of leaving his basket and taking over Dave and Morley’s bed every night, once an irritating habit, now a fond memory: “But as soon as Dave and Morley were breathing rhythmically, Arthur’s head would rise like periscope and he would slide over the edge of his basket and work his way into the bedroom, keeping low to the ground – as if he were hunting. He would stop a foot short of the bed and cock an ear. If he didn’t like the way one of them was breathing, he would bring his face close to theirs and listen, sometimes for five or ten minutes, staring at them like a priest taking confession, his wet nose only inches away from their faces.”McLean had described these exact same situation in “Vinyl Cafe Unplugged”, but this time, as the title suggests, Arthur’s doggy habits have taken on significance of an entirely different dimension, and the family mourns as if for a king – even placing an offering (a potato) on Arthur’s vacated throne, his basket. This story is one of the sad ones in the collection, along with fewer stories written to get a chuckle from the reader, and more to get the reader to pause and consider.Two stories, “Hello, Monster”, “Tour de Dave” and “Attack of the Treadmill” are on the familiar theme of accident-prone, clumsy Dave getting himself into unimaginable difficulties, and despite the fact that the reader can see disaster coming a mile away, they are still funny. But many more are observances of the small things that make life worthwhile, quiet, simple stories about memories, traditions, private pleasures.The increased seriousness of this collection is indicated with McLean’s always clever titles, which are never what you expect, and this time around, have literary references, for instance, “Midnight in the Garden of Envy” refers to “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” by John Berendt (1994), with the tale reinterpreted with a clever twist. “Whatever Happened to Johnny Flowers” is a nod to 1960s folk music hit “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”“Annie’s Turn” is about a moment in the children’s lives when they made a plan and became heroes, at least to one bedraggled dog, without a single adult being involved. “Had they been a few years younger, they would have told their parents. Had they been younger, they wouldn’t have dreamed this was something they could tackle themselves. But just like the weather, they were balanced in the precarious no man’s land between things. In the fog between fantasy and fact. They had lost the blessings of childhood, but they had not yet received the benedictions of age. They still had this, however – they had the belief of boys.” With this story, McLean demonstrates that he understands how children’s minds work. And he also carefully observes the human condition and captures aspects of it in his stories. The group The PepTides created a song for every story in “Revenge of The Vinyl Cafe”, also for this one. “Attack of the Treadmill” is suitably catchy. My suspicion is that these stories are even better listened to than read, but even in written form they are very entertaining. Does it seem plausible that a regular family in small town Canada would experience all these events? Um. But as the foreword says "life would be pretty tedious if all we did was stick to the facts".My favourites in this collection are: The House Next Door, where Morley is asked to feed the fish of a neighbour's posh house and her escapism there is a natural consequence. I also enjoyed Midnight in the Garden of Envy especially after fighting our own ivy vines every summer and Code Yellow I'll have to remember for when I'd need to visit a friend in the hospital.Less so: Attack of the Treadmill - crawling on a treadmill that is on at high speed - really? Same with Tour de Dave. Although maybe a certain Dave I know could pull it off.
