In the title story of Bill Gaston's seventh book and third collection, Sex is Red (Cormorant $19.95), a man waits twenty years to work out his revenge on the woman who spurned him. In a story called Saving Eve's Father, a man manages to prevent his girlfriend's father from throwing away his life on a video gambling machine. We also meet a long-dead father who continues to communicate through letters, an evangelical vandal, a bureaucrat with a mysterious tattoo, an English lord on vacation in Prince Edward Island and a woman who, when given a pair of socks, learns she has married the wrong man. Gaston has played pro hockey, worked as a logger and as a fishing guide. More than thirty of his stories have appeared in literary magazines. "I think it might be my best [book] to date,"; he says, "but that's just me loving my most recent baby, so it could be a hormonal thing."; Gaston teaches in Victoria. 1-896951-09-0

[BCBW AUTUMN 1999]