Love on the Killing Floor is a rat's eye view of Toronto in the early nineties. In our story the city has just been dragged into the cosmopolitan tempo it would beat its chest to a decade later, kicking and screaming. The novel opens in the shadow of Paul Bernardo's Scarborough horrorfest and the race riots of '92. Our protagonist is a bottom rung photographer for a small studio; a divorcee moving from party to party and woman to woman, a smug nihilist smack in his element. With his narrator's voice he turns his observations towards the ethnicities he see's as flooding his Toronto, and rehashes arguments and gripes against the inevitable you're likely to have heard yourself from malcontents of every stripe. The racial disharmony is easily the most prominent theme in the book, but one of the more interesting off-shoots of our narrator's wailing is his opposition to the Homer Simpsonization of white masculinity.
He sees media reflecting a flabby, bumbling, inelegant coward in his image while the "plight" of the "Other" is romanticized. It's bitterness, but it's bitterness that makes those enlightened souls we swallow a little harder. Trevor Clark very cleverly paints his narrator into a corner, quickly running out of faces and people he can stomach, and allows for his escape by way of Yolanda. Yolanda is a black go-getter who thanks to our narrator's formidable boldness is seduced and enters into a relationship that finally lets him take his foot off the passive aggressive pedal. She nips the sharper points of his swelling bigotry and acts as the part-catalyst for his getting his life together; getting a proper job and systematically dropping all of his old suspect acquaintances.
Love on the Killing Floor holds within its expertly bound pages about as many sex scenes as you could shake a prosthetic leg at, none of them exactly laden with allegory but entertaining enough and a very compelling blend of machismo and sensitivity.
The book is bound to make you a bit uncomfortable, it pushes a few buttons that don't usually get pushed anymore and any Toronto Readers will love hearing short stories about people who could live on low wages and still afford beer in bars and studio apartments. You missed one hell of a recession son.
