Bill Gaston (Jen Steele Photography)

In the first story of Tunnel Island, the new collection of short fiction from Gabriola Island, B.C., writer Bill Gaston, readers are introduced to the titular Gulf Island that forms the setting for the collection. “Tunnel Island,” he writes, “was mostly forest, but a few thousand people lived here and it had a bit of everything. A village they called Downtown. A small college. Huge estates, but also a soup kitchen. Heated rural politics.” Tunnel Island, however, is more than just a backdrop for these 11 stories; in all its paradoxes and contradictions, the island itself serves as the thematic core of the collection, the existential framework upon which the stories themselves are built.

In the opening story “The Caretaker,” for example, Jack, who is under a restraining order barring him from seeing his daughter, lives in a rented “tarpaper cabin,” and supplements his caretaker income by poaching seafood. Firmly ensconced on the lowest end of the island’s economic spectrum, his concept – to rent out the houses in his care on Airbnb – seems perfectly reasonable. After all, “He did a good job looking after these places, and maybe custodial pride made him feel he owned something of them.” Suffice it to say, the owners, on discovering his rental scam, don’t feel quite the same way..

Gaston, one of Canada’s most respected writers, with multiple prize nominations and awards, renders the key dichotomies of human nature, and of life on the island – beauty and violence, trust and betrayal, isolation and community, joy and heartbreak – with a deceptive ease and deftness. The language of the stories is powerful and closely observed, but never overworked, the careful craft subsumed in service to the narrative itself.

In “Skelebones,” Walker, a “teacher of biology, nemesis of things irrational,” is spending Halloween night caring for Rachel, his partner of seven years. Rachel, “a witch without irony, good God,” has chosen Samhain, “‘when the veil between the two worlds is thinnest.’ … the holiest time of their year, though holy wasn’t one of their words,” for her death, and Walker spends the evening – and the story – at her bedside and bounding downstairs to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters. “Her breathing was more ragged and painful sounding,” Gaston writes, when Walker returns from one such jaunt, awarding candy to a “Pink Power Ranger” and “one girl [who] was made up way too sultry for a ten-year-old, but maybe on this night you could be anything you wanted, no matter how unclear you might be on what it meant.” “When he took [Rachel’s] hand, it twitched then relaxed. He let the back of her hand rest lightly in his palm. He could feel that she liked it, though outwardly nothing had changed.” The attention to detail is impressive, yet it doesn’t draw attention to itself; the reader remains profoundly immersed in Rachel’s gradual death, and the story builds to a moment of unexpected numinousness.

Rachel’s death – and Halloween itself – draws the diverse strands of the community together, underscoring one of the collection’s other strengths: while each story stands on its own, the collection reveals links throughout. Collections of linked stories are nothing new, of course, but the linkages, like Gaston’s prose, are never overplayed, functioning instead like the web of community on the island itself. Characters mentioned in passing – and often not by name – in one story are major characters in another.

Everything comes together in the collection’s closer, “Frank’s Christmas Story,” in which a fortuitous roadkill creates an opportunity for a community Christmas celebration. As the characters gather, and the event goes off the rails (be careful of your roadkill, kids), one may be reminded of the final line of one of the earlier stories: “‘You aren’t making up the story,’ he said, ‘when it’s about everybody.’” This could be Gaston’s credo for the collection, and, honestly, for his career as a whole.