Boundary Problems

By Greg Bechtel

In his confident debut, Greg Bechtel offers ten charged stories about the impossible-turned-possible—secrets, paranoia, sex, conspiracies, and magic—that the strangeness of the world around us. Boundary Problems vibrates on the edge of meaning, as carjackers, accidental gunrunners, small-town cabbies, and confused physics students struggle to wring meaning from the strange events that overtake them. Bechtel's worlds of mystery, physics, and magic constantly challenge his characters' pursuit of logical explanations. These compelling tales blur lines and push boundaries—into the surreal, into the playful, into the irresistibility of uncertainty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Freehand Books
• Release date: Mar 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781770484764

Greg Bechtel

Greg Bechtel’s occasionally prize-winning stories have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, On Spec, Qwerty, and the Tesseracts anthologies of speculative fiction. Originally from Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Greg has lived at various times in Toronto, Deep River, Jamaica, Ottawa, Quebec City, and Fredericton while working (among other things) as a lifeguard, technical writer, mover, visual basic programmer, camp counsellor, semiconductor laser labtech, cab driver, tutor, and teacher. Currently, he lives and writes in Edmonton, where he teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Alberta whenever they let him. Boundary Problems is his first book.

Reviews for Boundary Problems

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Greg Bechtel’s narratives (some are more or less stories) sometimes feel intensely real, gritty, and typically dark. At other times they move slightly beyond the obvious, eclipsing the uncanny and heading right on over into surreal territory. But they somehow also come back to the rough ground. Whether he is walking us through the various strata of modern physics, or detailing life as car seventy-one in a Fredericton taxis service, or learning life lessons as a camp counsellor in Algonquin Park, or delivering advertising flyers under an assumed name, Bechtel’s descriptive and emotional language feels entirely earned. As though these might all be transcriptions from life. Or, more probably, so thoroughly written that nothing but the real remains. I was completely convinced.Not surprisingly for a first story collection, the writing seems to test out different modes. The three iterations of “The Smut Story” have the clinical zeal of David Foster Wallace. Whereas “Blackbird Shuffle” edges into the macabre and feels a bit like Neil Gaiman. More typically, Bechtel’s narrator is a slightly distanced observer even of himself, as in the bildungsroman-like “Boundary Problems” or the lengthy and meandering “The Everett-Wheeler Hypothesis”. Bechtel uses this technique as well to surprisingly good effect in “The Mysterious East (Fredericton, NB)”. And this one nicely dovetails his knack for writing the bones of employment (here as a taxi driver) with the tentative suspicion of the quasi-mystical. It is fascinating.I purchased this collection on a whim without previous knowledge of the author’s work. I’m glad I took a chance. Gently recommended.

[fiverivers_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It would be egregiously erroneous to fail to recognize Greg Bechtel's accomplished writing. There is no question he understands the nuance of language. His work is witty, clever, targeted for an audience looking for literature rather than escapism.Yet in this collection of short stories one has the feeling of being the stranger at a gathering of a closed order of colleagues, all sharing clever inside jokes. This exclusion of the reader reaches an uncomfortable crescendo in the trilogy of writings entitled the Smut Stories which are placed in reverse order without apparent cohesion throughout the collection. There is definitely an homage in the stories to award-winning author, Candas Jane Dorsey (Black Wine and Paradigm of Earth). There is a definite attempt to examine the concept 'being one's own pornographer'. But the entire triad remains inaccessible and irrelevant to any but those involved in that inner circle.As to the remainder of the stories in the collection, while clever, there is little by way of character or background development to snag a reader, and so despite Bechtel's attempt to illuminate the social construct around sex and sexuality, the stories, for the most part, run too deeply to the academic to elicit any emotional response.However, as I've constantly stated, art is subjective. I would by no means dissuade a person from reading this ambitious collection, for what to one is opaque, to another may be visionary.