Bill Gaston is a master of comic incongruity, able to translate the excesses of our culture into the exaggerated peculiarities of his characters. Gaston says that his teenage years in Dollarton, B.C., paralleled the idyllic, rabble-rousing world of his short fiction in Deep Cove Stories. He describes his work as "artful exaggeration": his first novel, Tall Lives, plays with fictional convention, draws attention to artifice, and dabbles in scatalogical excess. Gaston believes his role as a writer is partly to entertain and partly to record a positive version of truth.
