“[a] powerful novel—simply and directly told, with a great narrative engine and a fully realized emotional arc.”—Trevor Corkum, The World After Us

NOVEL-IN-STORIES SET IN THE FRASER VALLEY | Alex Turner and Lucian Childs
Coming Fall 2026 from Arsenal Pulp Press

In 1956, fifteen-year-old Teddy—a lonely boy drawn to the water and woods surrounding his small town of Harrison Hot Springs, BC—is overwhelmed by his feelings when he meets the bad boy Wade.

Over the rapturous early years of their friendship, the two range over the area’s mountains and waterways, before falling out after high school because of Teddy’s sexuality. In their separation that follows, Ted struggles to live openly as a gay man in a surprisingly wild pre-Stonewall gay Vancouver. There, he is befriended by a lively crew of eccentrics—a new, chosen family—who aid him in finding fulfillment, both as a gay man and as an artist. In the novel’s poignant conclusion, Ted must decide whether or not to reunite with the man who once meant so much to him: the sexy and mercurial Wade.

While this story of star-crossed friends entertains with humour, twists and cliffhangers, it contributes to our understanding of a seldom-described period in the Canadian queer experience, the foundational years just prior to the 1969 Stonewall riots and the birth of the modern gay rights movement.

As elsewhere during this period, when the conformist ’50s were morphing into the politically divisive and freewheeling ’60s, in the Vancouver of the novel’s second part the move toward acceptance of gay love and sexuality was sidelined in the broader push for sexual liberation. And the city’s queer community—far from benefitting from the era’s drive for civil rights—continued to suffer discrimination and police harassment. Even so, Vancouver was a mecca for a new generation of queer people, whose social networks and gathering places—albeit largely out of sight—became the foundation for the thriving LGBTQ+ culture that blossomed post-Stonewall.

The small towns of Harrison Hot Springs and Agassiz, though largely at the periphery of this cultural moment, were powerfully affected by it, nonetheless. Brought largely by its returning sons and daughters—Alex among them—the new artistic influences and social practices, the books and generation-defining music of the day, all made their way to these Upper Fraser Valley towns.

This co-authored novel-in-stories draws on Alex Turner’s sixty-year history with this magical place to create a work of great intimacy and depth. The area’s mountains, its waterways, the mores of Vancouver’s bohemian enclave and the small Upper Fraser Valley towns drive the novel’s deep evocations of time and place, revealed through language that is both poetic, humorous and exuberantly down to earth.

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The penultimate tale from Confluence appears in this summer’s issue of Prairie Fire Magazine.