It would be easy to assess Joey Comeau’s The Complete Lockpick Pornography as a simple exploration of violence and sexuality. The volume is certainly semi-pornographic and, depending on your personal or literary boundaries, refreshingly subversive. On those terms alone, it is a significant accomplishment: Comeau holds membership with a tiny group of envelope-pushing Canadian writers who challenge what we collectively view as worthy and acceptable subject matter in our literature. In Comeau’s universe, public bathroom trysts, shoplifting, break-ins, and mall assaults each possess a unique poetry. If you look deep enough, however – past the initial titillation and provocation, past the cynical dismissal inherent in Comeau’s brand of humour – there is a much richer concern here.

The book collects Comeau’s cultish, initially self-published story “Lockpick Pornography” and its previously unpublished thematic companion, “We All Got It Coming,” in a single brutal, lustful, and surprisingly comic volume. The former is an absurd adventure in vigilante justice, the latter a tender love story arising out of an act of workplace violence. As a whole, the book artfully walks that troubling line between repulsion and attraction, each scene challenging mainstream notions of beauty and ugliness, good and evil. Characters repeatedly upend power and gender dynamics, and the reader is confronted with the necessity of empathizing with the flawed, discomforting, violent, or impotent actions of well-meaning outsiders.

The author is a master at depicting characters who feel powerless in the face of systems beyond their control and who are desperately groping for anything that will restore the balance. His writing style – at once jarring, tender, and humorous – mirrors the hopeless search for justice in a world that consistently denies it.

Comeau is one of the most exciting and innovative authors writing in Canada today. Evidence lies in a beautifully spare moment toward the end of “We All Got It Coming,” one that sums up his skill as a keen observer: “He’s been walking around all day with his T-shirt on inside out. And he’s mine.” Comeau has an unparalleled knack for finding the sweet sadness and rare humour in common pain, in the painfully commonplace. In doing so he reveals that fairness arises not through enacting punishment, but rather out of the flawed yet beautifully human company we keep.