Home Sweet Unhomely

At first, Geoffrey Morehouse, a federal clerk in the 1980s, resists the occult contagion that has overtaken his cubicle-hived floor at Transport Canada. His fellow bureaucrats have been voraciously reading a mysterious red book, with troubling results. They have begun speaking in fragments, omitting the words “I,” “eye,” and “aye,” and sticking out their tongues. The pressure to conform mounts. Everyone else has read the book — why not Geoffrey? Is being lizard-like really so bad?

This strange scenario crystallizes many of the strengths of André Alexis’s collection The Night Piece. For one, there’s the sheer imaginative gymnastics required to conceive this premise and the narrative twists and turns that unspool from it. There’s the deft mining of voice for comedy: Geoffrey’s deadpan account, its tone timid and pedantic, jars ironically with his unnerving plight. There’s likewise the gentle satire of bureaucratic Ottawa, a motif that binds several of these...