December 2, 2025
Simple Creatures, by Robert McGill
My true confession is that wide-ranging short story collections don’t always do it for me, that I like a book to be A Book, complete with common threads and cohesion, but I really liked Robert McGill’s Simple Creatures—a nominee for this year’s Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Partly because his publisher, Coach House Books, knows a thing or two about how to make A Book (the very fibres of their pages are interesting), and also because it was my introduction to his delightfully ever-so-subtly off-the-wall narrative voice which never fails to be surprising, whether he’s writing from the point of view of a wife watching her 76-year-old philandering husband run races from her wheelchair parked on the sidelines, a PhD candidate writing her thesis on an iconic author whose chronicles of small town Ontario have created their own mythology (and then some), an ASMR Youtuber, or a third person story about an endocrinologist reincarnated as a chimpanzee.
Some of these stories go way back—two of them were published in The Journey Prize Stories in 2003. And while others, no doubt, are of similar vintage, each story in the collection reads as fresh, infused with empathy and curiosity for the human condition, and a warmth and humour that sit in balance. Which is not to suggest that these stories are as simple as the creatures that people them. There’s an uneasiness to their cadence, an uncertainty at their core, and McGill’s willingness to let his characters—and his readers—sit with that is why the collection is so rich and engaging.
