Finding humour in desolation and beauty in the absurd, this darkly comic story collection chronicles our struggle for control in an uncontrollable world.

An eruption of violence at a book reading. A doomed infatuation at the dawn of a plague. A married couple finding their carefully balanced lives as lighthouse keepers upended when they rescue a young woman from drowning. An oil executive spiralling into self-doubt as he is slowly swallowed by a snake.

Set in prepper cabins and dentist offices, ivory towers and backwoods cults, these and other stories tell of a Canadian west made new and strange. Equipped with a gallows humour and a keen sense of the loneliness, irrationality, and unexpected cruelties of modern life, Just a Howl explores the many ways the twenty-first century corrodes our every attempt to connect to one another, as all the while a backdrop of catastrophe — personal, societal, and ecological — tilts the comic into the tragic.