Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club

February in Newfoundland is the longest month of the year.

Another blizzard is threatening to tear a strip off downtown St. John's, while inside The Hazel restaurant a storm of sex, betrayal, addiction, and hurt is breaking. Iris, a young hostess from ‘round the bay, is forced to pull a double despite resolving to avoid the charming chef and his wealthy restaurateur wife. Just tables over, Damian, a hungover and self-loathing server, is trying to navigate a potential punch-up with a pair of lit customers who remain oblivious to the rising temperature in the dining room. Olive, a young Indigenous woman far from home, watches it all unfurl from the fast and frozen street. It is through Olive, largely unnoticed by the others, that we glimpse the truth behind the scathing lies and unrelenting abuse, and it is her resilience that proves most enduring in the dead of this winter's tale.

By turns biting, funny, poetic, and heartbreaking, Megan Coles' debut novel rips into the inner lives of a wicked cast of characters, building towards a climax that will shred perceptions and force a reckoning. This is blistering Newfoundland Gothic for the twenty-first century, a wholly original, bracing, and timely portrait of a place in the throes of enormous change, where two women confront the traumas of their past in an attempt to overcome the present and pick up the future.

PRAISE FOR MEG COLES AND EATING HABITS OF THE CHRONICALLY LONESOME: "A potent fiction debut . . . These stories are blunt and direct." - Quill & Quire "Characters are the crux of this breed of lively, unrestrained short fiction, and the cast in this book are endearing, gut-busting, and memorably real." - The Overcast "Pitch perfect. Appropriately restrained and conversational. Coles is not your average newbie. She's a serious talent who deserves to be mentioned alongside other young Newfoundland writers like Joel Thomas Hynes and Sara Tilley." - Atlantic Books Today "The stories are often very short, even only four pages, but in each she compresses situation (relationship fracture and reknit), character (distilled to their absolute wants), and setting (St. John's, Montreal, or Korea) like a literary Oreo cookie. It's all about the crux, the crisis, propelled from the first sentence . . . crisp, lyric prose." - The Telegram

MEGAN GAIL COLES is a graduate of the Memorial University of Newfoundland and the National Theatre School of Canada and is completing an MFA at the University of British Columbia. She has completed numerous plays, and her first fiction collection of short stories, Eating Habits of the Chronically Lonesome, won the BMO Winterset Award, the ReLit Award, and the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award and earned her the one-time Writers' Trust 5x5 prize. Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club is her first novel. Originally from Savage Cove on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, Megan now resides in St. John's, where she is the Executive Director of Riddle Fence and Projects Manager at Eastern Edge Gallery.