The Porcupine's Quill

‘Warning: The following stories contain nudity, violence, pianos, amazingly radiant verbalising, venomous weather, and funny clanking noises in the tiled washrooms of the nation. Viewer discretion is advised.’

The Sound of All Flesh is a volume of apocalyptic stories full of loud sounds and bright colours. Daily life becomes infused with a hallucinatory brightness and Rabelaisian energy and excess. In Barry Webster’s unique stories, earthquakes happen when people go too long without sex, a grand piano becomes a sailboat crossing the ocean and clowns hiding in the Canadian Shield suddenly invade the suburbs of Toronto. We meet a sexually-impotent gay fashionista, a travel writer terrified of being photographed, a suddenly hydrophobic competitive swimmer and an opera singer who finds inspiration by bathing in tubs of margarine. These stories, which meander from Switzerland’s imaginary avenues of cash to the streets of Toronto and Berlin, are musical scores, full of unexpected crescendoes and sudden fortissimos.

Webster humanizes his bizarre tales with humour and and unexpected moments of pathos. Readers will find unforgettable characters among the sound and fury of Webster’s language, characters who struggle to overthow their obsessions.

The Sound of All Flesh brings us into another world, at once hilarious, disturbing and poignant. Stories in the collection have been shortlisted for the National Magazine Award and the CBC-Quebec prize.

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‘Both highly erotic and anti-pornographic, humanizing investing souls in objectified bodies.’

—N A Hayes, Pop Matters

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‘Barry Webster is a classically trained pianist. Parents of budding prodigies beware: If Webster’s story collection reflects his experience, you’d do better to put your money on tap dancing. His story ‘‘The Royal Conservatory Statement and Fugue for Eight Voices’’ opens with a piano teacher gazing from her studio window at ‘‘dangling icicles, dead squirrels, and tress reft by lightning.’’ The hard chill, the little frozen corpses, the shattered trees preface an aria of beauties and horrors. In a fearless, magnificent run-on sentence, we encounter gold-buckled shoes, slit throats, tulips, scorpions and fresh hearts ‘‘whose blood drips in straight lines down the wallpaper and coagulates in little puddles below the electric sockets.’’ Enter the ice-pick-wielding mezzo-sopranos.’

—Jim Bartley, Globe and Mail

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‘Montreal author Barry Webster is a classically trained musician, a pianist to be precise, and in his writing, that fact couldn’t be made more clear. The Sound of All Flesh, his first published compendium of short fiction, is ruled by rhythm, breathing imagery in and out like the dependable lungs of an accordion.’

—Isa Tousignant, Hour (Montreal)

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‘Imagine a world threatened by clowns, enriched by music, and teetering on the edge of change, and you have a taste of the rich offering in this strong debut collection.’

—Laurie Elmquist, Monday Magazine

Unpublished endorsement

‘Barry Webster’s stories constitute a magical glass window through which we see more clearly into the human story than with ordinary prose. Webster’s fiction neither magnifies nor distorts, but its clarity of vision permits a reader to see the longing for a better life that underlies ordinary existence -- that wish his characters (and ourselves) have for a happier past, a more caring and just present, a beneficent future. By unflinchingly revealing the gritty and the glorious, these tales bring into sharp focus previously opaque dimensions to how people function amid restrictive social constructs and a damaged natural world that we inherit and must transform or at least cope with.’

—Tom Wayman