From Amazon
In her debut collection of razor-edged short fiction, Vancouver's Charlotte Gill explores the seamy side of sex in the city. The ladykiller of the title story gets his kicks from rubbing up against strange women in malls and parking garages. Other protagonists include a washed-up diving instructor who can't stop fantasizing about his 16-year-old student, a confused young woman who drifts into a disastrous affair with her middle-aged professor, and barracuda-like twin sisters on the prowl for men on a Thai beach. In "Hush," the most disturbing of these seven tales of contemporary urban life, a desperate couple fixates on the crying baby in the apartment below in a vain attempt to repair their frying relationship. "Hush" was a finalist for the Journey Prize, but an even more artful piece of fiction is the opening story, "You Drive." In alternating flashbacks, a pot dealer and his casual girlfriend recall the sequence of seemingly disconnected moments that brought them to a nearly fatal smash-up on a snowy cliff. This story twists and turns like the lonely strip of highway the two are speeding down, revealing character in fleeting drive-by glimpses.
Gill's language is richly sensual, raked through with strangely vivid images ("a snotty evening rain," "the buds of our earphones"). Although her metaphors occasionally twine out of control ("The sky is a big grey pancake with pink light sizzling at its distant images") and her characters are somewhat limited, Ladykiller is an intriguing first offering in much the same vein as the fiction of Lisa Moore and Elise Levine. --Lisa Alward
Review
"In Charlotte Gill's shockingly unsentimental stories, her emotional pyromaniacs hurtle towards various degress of conflagration. CAUTION: Her prose is booby-trapped with combinations of words so lethally effective they may as well be dynamite." (Zsuzsi Gartner )
...topics and descriptive tactics are well wed to Gill's characters' sensibilities and make for some cleverly arresting observation and imagery. Her sense of satire is no less honed. (Quill & Quire )
There is something both dark and tender in "Ladykiller". Charlotte Gill is a wise purveyor of the heart's loyal yet capricious nature. A stylish and sassy debut. (Michael Winter )
...an excellent collection...This is an intelligent, contemporary book...Every story in "Ladykiller" sings in its own way. Nothing should have been done better in "Ladykiller". Charlotte Gill's voice is on every page, her sure eye for contemporary detail, her originality and unsentimental wit, her ability to deliver us to endings with a sense of having read tellingly about our own world. About ourselves, even. That is Charlotte Gill's authority. And that's also why, when finishing "Ladykiller", I wished I had something else written by Gill to open immediately. I wanted back in. (Globe and Mail )
...topics and descriptive tactics are well wed to Gill's characters' sensibilities and make for some cleverly arresting observation and imagery. Her sense of satire is no less honed. (Quill & Quire )
There is something both dark and tender in "Ladykiller". Charlotte Gill is a wise purveyor of the heart's loyal yet capricious nature. A stylish and sassy debut. (Michael Winter )
...an excellent collection...This is an intelligent, contemporary book...Every story in "Ladykiller" sings in its own way. Nothing should have been done better in "Ladykiller". Charlotte Gill's voice is on every page, her sure eye for contemporary detail, her originality and unsentimental wit, her ability to deliver us to endings with a sense of having read tellingly about our own world. About ourselves, even. That is Charlotte Gill's authority. And that's also why, when finishing "Ladykiller", I wished I had something else written by Gill to open immediately. I wanted back in. (Globe and Mail )
Book Description
"Ladykiller" is the astonishing debut collection of seven smart stories from an exciting new voice in Canadian literature. Charlotte Gill is a brilliant young writer who is not afraid to stare down the truth and shame the devil. She conjures compelling stories about escape, self-sabotage, and the power of unconscious desire. A couple plots against a crying baby in the apartment below as their dysfunctional relationship begins to veer off course. A hot-shot scuba-diving instructor falls for a teenaged girl in a perilous Lolita-like romance. Twin sisters travel to exotic lands in search of romance in order to rescue themselves from their own dark, intense bond. A woman reconnects with the son of her father's mistress, and together they begin an obsession with the past. A medical student embarks on an affair with a professor and discovers revolution in disastrous consequences. An unfaithful man takes his girlfriend to his ailing mother's for Christmas, only to find himself at the crossroads of sexual impulse and mortality. "Ladykiller" is peopled with characters who succumb to the allure of trouble, who find it more satisfying to ruin than create. Gill explores this terrain with empathy and wit. Shot through with comic irony and gentle satire, these are compelling stories about the foibles of the human heart. "Ladykiller" is a brave collection of short fiction that reveals the strange wisdom embedded in our darkest instincts.
From the Inside Flap
Praise for Charlotte Gill:
"In Charlotte Gill's shockingly unsentimental stories, her emotional pyromaniacs hurtle towards various degrees of conflagration. CAUTION: Her prose is booby-trapped with combinations of words so lethally effective they may as well be dynamite." – Zsuzsi Gartner
About the Author
Charlotte Gill was born in London, England, and raised in the United States and Canada. She is a graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Her work appeared in Canadian literary magazines, in Best Canadian stories, and has been broadcast on CBC Radio. One of the stories from this collection, "Hush", was a finalist for the 2003 Journey Prize. She lives in Vancouver.
