Told with a barely-suppressed hilarity, these stories are set, for the most part, against the vanishing backdrop of a once-bountiful Ontario. In a series of acutely drawn incidents, the author strips away the ingrained, romanticized version of rural life to reveal a place where people climb, confidently, and blind drunk, behind the wheel of their pick-up trucks, crash through the spring ice of glacial lakes while carting a case of beer on their shoulders, and happily break every hunting and fishing regulation ever invented.
The intense humour of these stories is tempered only by the realities of the landscapes in which they're set. Unemployment, the collapse of a notorious forest industry, high rates of alcoholism and suicide, all inform The Rock Farmers with its tragic counterpoint. The result is a vital, contemporary portrait of a stubborn people working a hard land, for a doubtful harvest.
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