On a much less serious note, there is Tacones (Anvil Press, 130 pages, $11.95 paper) by the twenty-two-year-old Todd Klinck, the winner of the 1996 Three-Day Novel Contest. "Tacones" is Spanish for high heels and is the name of a fictional downtown Toronto club where strange characters congregate. Klinck adopts a flippant, smart-ass tone, all street talk and attitude without substance. After thirty-nine such (mercifully brief) chapters, the trendy callousness wears thin.

The following is a representative sample of the style and content overall:

"It really is obvious to him that people should wear condoms when they fuck animals. He is really into cleanliness, which outweighs the idea that one's desire for animal genitals might be wrong. Besides, he probably doesn't think it's wrong to fuck animals. As long as it doesn't hurt them too much."

The offensive aspect of this and similar passages is that they have no significance within the context of the work as a whole. (The contrast to Paul's Case in this regard is worth noting.) In all fairness to Klinck, Tacones is, after all, the product of three days' work. It would be interesting to see what he could do in three months. Or three years.