Rue Saint-Denis

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Every evening, on both banks of rue Saint-Denis between Maisonneuve and Ontario, on either side of the raucous flow of traffic, where cars stretch out strangely in slim files through green lights or huddle at red ones, like so many doleful boa constrictors crawling through an indolent throng of men and women, curious people filled with curiosity, drawn to the narrow genial terraces, linger with cold beer or dip a croque-monsieur in their coffee. Among them, at nightfall, many will go odd to join the quiet yet odd universe of those quite agreeably in tune with the ways of the world. Others, marked by the treacherous finger of Chance, will fall victim to the devil’s anguish-laden traps. Perhaps sorcerors wil escort them down into the entrails of a spell-binding past or, with a blend of incantation and spiritualism, will bury a magic needle in the cloth of their crumpled bodies; a haunted house may tear their flesh asunder or a fearsome crack, first seen at the tip of their heel, may then loom a the far reaches of the world. André Carpentier is Quebec’s master “raconteur,” a spinner of yarns. Rue St. Denis is his first collection of Gothic tales in the tradition of Guy de Maupassant or Poe. The eight stories of transformation and transcendence, weave a tapestry from the dark of the unconscious, imbued by an atmosphere of the supernatural, of the mythic and the mystical. From the fantastic to the marvellous, from the grotesque to the sublime, from the real to the surreal, with Rue St. Denis, English readers can cross the border of the imagination to experience one of the most remarkable and vital writers of short fiction in Quebec.