Early ReviewersDean Gessie

Ranked Top 10 "Best Lit Mags of 2023" by Chill Subs

Synopsis: Carefully curated stories from our monthly magazine to create a themed short story book about the philosophy and ethics of crimes and their punishments. Perfect for classrooms and book clubs, each story is 1,500-7,000 words and comes with five suggested discussion questions.

• Idle Horns: A horned demon of hell born to eternally torture the damned walks off the job.
  


• Community Of Peers: A foreigner wanders into a remote village just before a convicted criminal is about to be punished and is asked to throw the first stone.
  


• Form Seven Alpha: A city resident is caught breaking the law and is given the choice between one of five punishment options.
  


• Conscience Cleaners: A genuinely repentant criminal appeals to the court to have his memory erased of the crime he committed.
  


• Blackorwhite: A lactose intolerant inmate tells his story to, and befriends, the doctor assigned to look after him.
  


• Conveyor: Arthur Montague is on trial for genocide and war crimes...again, and again, for eternity.
  


• Soon The Sentence Sign: A bar fight turns into a brush with the colonial AI driven judicial system.
  


• Bunny Racing: Two bunnies race, but one of them has been eating a special carrot from the forbidden forest to help him run faster.
  


• The Only Punishment: A street-hardened criminal is forced to live his crimes from the perspective of his victims.
  


• Human Contact: A college student heads to a party, gets high and drunk, and ends up having a night that will forever change lives.

Animal allegory in the tradition of Animal Farm by George Orwell. The story reflects American political culture before and during the presidency of Donald Trump. The new leader of the lake nation of Swanville, simply called the Trumpeter, promises an ambitious agenda. He will dismantle the Swan Care Act of his predecessor, President Lulu. He will drain the Swamp where the left-wing oligarchy eat the very best protein and vegetation. He will increase shoreline habitat by bringing down the beaver wall on the North River. And he will ban migratory birds from Swanville because they are looters and moochers and not part of the Great Swan’s plan. Eventually, the new president becomes cob-in-chief of a nation at war with its neighbors and itself. TrumpeterVille is political satire that wags a cautionary tale. Dean Gessie was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario. He enjoyed a long career as Head of the English Department at Pickering College in Newmarket, Ontario. While there, he was also Director of the award-winning Joshua Weinzweig Creative Writing Program. Gessie won Honorable Mention in the Press 53 Novella Competition. Also, one of his short stories was selected to the list of Highly Commended Stories in the international Manchester Fiction Prize. Most recently, Gessie published Guantanamo Redux, dystopian fiction about the near future in America and the byzantine complications of survival in an authoritarian state. Gessie has also written and served extensively as a social justice activist.

A fictional memoir that unpacks blood sport in the marketplace. The narrator finances many years of post-secondary education by taking summer jobs of dizzying variety. As he documents his experiences, he becomes porte-parole for a generation in the grips of precarious work. More broadly, however, he illuminates personalities of intriguing emotional and psychological complexity in circumstances that are obviously or discreetly desperate. These are dispatches from the front lines, stories that present an ironic and critical portrait of economic activity and human imperfections. Adversity and anguish burn in the atmosphere as do humor and heroism. The workplace is a dangerous environment to earn a living. Dean Gessie was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario. He enjoyed a long career as Head of the English Department at Pickering College in Newmarket, Ontario. While there, he was also Director of the award-winning Joshua Weinzweig Creative Writing Program. Gessie won Honorable Mention in the Press 53 Novella Competition. Also, one of his short stories was selected to the list of Highly Commended Stories in the international Manchester Fiction Prize. Most recently, Gessie published Guantanamo Redux, dystopian fiction about the near future in America and the byzantine complications of survival in an authoritarian state. Gessie has also written and served extensively as a social justice activist.

The novella uses the techniques of speculative fiction and science fiction to create a dystopian vision of the near future in America. Here, most any kind of dissent is criminalized and individuals are routinely charged with terrorism offences. The L. A. Mercy Killer is incarcerated in the Bay of Frisco, a center for domestic terrorists, after the third terror has destroyed much of Los Angeles. Special Agent Orwell and Judge Dan believe the girl whose face you can’t see was deeply involved in not only the Mercy Killer’s crime, but, also, the massive terror attack on Los Angeles. In Part II of the novella, a flashback, we retrace the steps of the girl whose face you can’t see prior to the third terror. Who is she and what does she represent? Did she know the L.A. Mercy Killer? Was she responsible for his crime and for her own? The conclusion of the novella is a chilling expose of how conformity and authoritarianism threaten freedom, imagination, language, life and limb. The L.A. Mercy Killer stands in the long tradition of dissidents who rage against the security state. Dean Gessie enjoyed a long career as Head of the English Department at Pickering College in Newmarket, Ontario. While there, he was also Director of the award-winning Joshua Weinzweig Creative Writing Program. As a teenager, Gessie’s play won best entry for Northern Ontario in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s playwriting contest. Gessie also won Honorable Mention in the 2008 Press 53 Novella Competition. Most recently, one of Gessie’s short stories was selected to the list of Highly Commended Stories in the international Manchester Fiction Prize, England’s biggest literary award for unpublished creative writing. Gessie has also written and served extensively as a social justice activist.