
The context is Summer 2017, Vancouver, British Columbia, where economic imperatives are making space less and less accessible to lower-income individuals. The rental crisis is intensifying, ravenous real estate development is thriving and there is a province-wide forest fire emergency, which blankets the city in smoke. The protagonist, Dylan Levett, is a recent university graduate being "renovicted" from his rent-controlled apartment, the central point of view of the story.
Notice is a Kafkaesque story about a man caught in the gears of a bureaucracy, a spiral-down, bad-to-worse kind of story. Socially relevant, this is a funhouse mirror held up to Vancouver, a working-class story that stands apart with its composite of literary techniques. Overall, Notice focuses on displacement and petty frustration, applying a documentary sensibility to an original and topical scenario.
Dustin Cole was born in Hinton, near Jasper, and raised in the town of High Level, a remote community in northwestern Alberta. He received his BA in history from Simon Fraser University and is the author of the poetry collection Dream Peripheries (General Delivery, 2015). He lives in Vancouver, BC.
Notice is a bad-to-worse, spiral-down story about an ornery man caught between the gears of gentrification and renoviction--a novel whose brutal gaze is repeatedly crossed by mice and rebar. It peels up the rug that is Vancouver to see what's been swept beneath, and follows a character who's trying to save himself from that same broom.
--Matthew Tomkinson, co-author of Archaic Torso of GumbyDustin Cole writes with clarity and passion, precision and accuracy. I see all the same qualities in Notice, which says more about Vancouver in the last decade than a thousand desperate pages of the "accommodation wanted" and "free stuff" sections on Craigslist.
--Richard Mackie, editor and publisher of The Ormsby Review