Simple Creatures
• A Walrus Top Ten Book of Fall 2024
Read an interview about the book here.
With an intimate, comic, and compassionate eye, the twelve stories in Simple Creatures consider what it means to live with less in the twenty-first century.
In this debut collection, Robert McGill explores the heartaches and joys of people who are desperate to uncomplicate their complicated world. Through stories taking the form of YouTube monologues, pet-care instructions, school reports, or the unspoken thoughts of a young scholar obsessed with a famous Canadian writer, Simple Creatures also shows us the sometimes hilarious, often poignant ways in which our use of language shapes our relationships with others and ourselves.
We meet a teenager who wants to live among a community of Bigfoot that he claims to have discovered in the woods; the widow of a famous endocrinologist after she gains custody of a chimpanzee from his lab; a boy whose fledgling hockey career is troubled by the fact that his name is Leo Gretzky; and a divorcee seeking out the mysterious author of a viral environmental pledge. Through their lives, Simple Creatures offers an acute, sympathetic portrait of our time.
Praise
"Reminded me of how potent an elixir the short story form can be."
"It’s hard not to be charmed by the short stories in Simple Creatures, especially with cheeky titles like 'Your ASMR Boyfriend Addresses the Climate Crisis.' Though some pieces are traditional in nature, others deploy left-field structures, like a YouTube narration or puppy training advice. For all the experimentation, humour, and nods to online life, at their core, McGill’s stories are grounded in human feeling—our yearnings, our anxieties, our obsessions, and our relationships with each other. Thanks to this deft balancing act, a story written as a high school report about Bigfoot ends up being weirdly, wonderfully moving."
"Robert McGill writes hilarious, smart, heart-breaking stories. A master of voice and dialogue, character and perspective, he knows everyone’s loneliness. We’re all in here, the whole arc of life: children in the beginning, elderly athletes battling to the end, and middle aged lovers trying to love in the middle of the internet and a climate disaster. Come watch as one of our best stylists plies his trade, pushing short fiction to its contemporary, ecstatic edge."