The Day of the Dead: Sliver Fictions, Short Stories & an Homage is a series of collisions between genders in the realms of sexuality, relationships, art and grief in three sections: Men & Women, Muses and The Dead. Owen explores secrecies, abject pasts, misunderstood desires, the urgency to create and the horrors of loss. The Day of the Dead takes the reader into discomforting worlds, thorned with fantasy and dark humour but rooted in the harsh and sometimes beautiful realities a woman and artist can face in 21st century society.
Like the subtitle connotes, Owen’s “sliver fictions” are short and sharp, unapologetically getting caught within inconvenient areas of the heart and mind. Familiar settings, like the cafeteria of a BC ferry, are made unheimlich, or uncanny, with the choice of conversation by strangers, or the memory of a character’s early sexual experiences. Interactions between boys, girls, ghosts, men, women and all sorts of bystander animals make for brief but elaborate tales twisted into hauntingly confounding shapes and angles.