Shortlisted for the 2008 Relit Award for FictionDirty pool halls greasy restaurants suburban skateboarder showdowns and dangerous drug denssome things in life just arent very subtle.And neither are the short stories in Six Ways to Sunday. In fact they brashly make out with subtletys teenage crush beat subtlety into the sidewalk take a dump on its favourite patch of daisies and unceremoniously bury it somewhere in the woods near Morgan Lake Quebec.Realism is often the central element of short fiction and often too much. Christian McPherson reminds us that to many people fictions are central to their realities lottery tickets deals with God the delusion of owning the worldor at least selectively rebuilding it in models bruisecovering makeovers a chronic criminal playing parent beating the bad guys and getting away with the loot and most certainly the divine creation of the perfect chilidog.McPherson infuses his gritty settings with a hyperkinetic imagination and fantastically animated writing style that make his stories impossible to put down or forget. The characters who subsist Six Ways to Sunday are the xenophobic the substanceabused the VLTaddicted and the just plain lost shining bright and battered in the dingy recesses of the bar. show more