» The Toronto Sunday Star
review by Ray Robertson

» Read an excerpt from Head Job,
John Swan's story in ICED

Nathan Whitlock, Quill & Quire, October. 2001
Despite their overheated introduction, in which they refer to Iced as "an Uzi in a literary hothouse," editors Kerry J. Schooley and Peter Sellers understand that noir fiction, like revenge, is a dish best served cold. The best of these 16 stories by Canadian authors are cool, clever, and completely oblivious to the limits of the genre, while showing respect for its conventions.

William Bankier's crisply-written "Her Voice on the Phone Was Magic" draws its protagonist to his fate with a delicious inevitability that is the very essence of noir. In "Avenging Miriam," anthology co-editor Peter Sellers spins a black tale of a dispassionate killer hired to kill nine teenage killers in Vancouver. Sellers risks sensationalism in using elements of a recent, real-life incident, but his characters are cynical, not grotesque; the situation horrifying, not implausible.

This collection's greatest strength is its editors' willingness to include works and authors that fall outside the genre. This openminded approach results in the book's most interesting inclusion, "The Stand-In," by Mike Barnes, a Journey Prize nominee and author of the short-story collection, The Aquarium, from which this story was taken. To label "The Stand-In" noir is a stretch - the deaths are accidental and occur offstage - but the story has an unsettling darkness knit into its frozen, isolated setting and psychology. James Powell's excellent "Winter Hiatus," a dystopian vision of urban anarchy and public relations, is more speculative fiction than noir. The editors even include Crad Kilodney's "Life Without Drama," which manages to celebrate the genre even as it mocks its most tenacious clichés.

A few of the stories never quite get their hooks in, and the stories by Kevin Burton Smith and Matthew Firth are little more than bad-boy posturing, but the generally high quality here is such that even the outright duds are little more than momentary dips. Iced is the rare genre anthology that contains many rewards for non-devotees and, as such, should be an annual event.

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The Ray Robertson, Toronto Sunday Star, October 21, 2001
In Iced…an opium-taking Hong Kong dealer chooses stolen antiquities over honouring the first commandment; a hitmen offers volume discounts; and a wide variety of people of different backgrounds get themselves threatened, beaten up or killed. Probably too many. Like any genre, Noir has its own prerequisites, and one of them seems to be that at least one act of violence must occur at least every other page. But at least things happen in Iced. Too often, the central requirement for works of fiction to be considered "serious" by critics and readers alike seems to be that nothing really occur, that people merely sit around and talk a great deal about their deep spiritual woes. …one is struck by how many, if not entire stories, then at least significant portions of stories in Iced, are infused with a smart, apposite humour. What dry invective, for example, could castigate every pathetic strip-club Romeo who's ever been positive that the stripper on stage notices him above every other drunken yahoo in the place better than Matthew Firth in "Can You Take Me There, Now?"? "She's changed out of the leathers and is now decked out in a slutty red number. Frilly. Folds of fat droop out from her tight panties and bra. A little drunk, I start to applaud as soon as she steps onto the stage, trying to whoop, but my mouth's full of mashed potatoes." Maybe it's because by working in a defined genre the authors in Iced allow themselves the liberty of telling interesting stories and using humour in way that too many literary writers don't. Maybe it's time they did.

Read an excerpt from Head Job, John Swan's story in ICED

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