David Halliday: 48 books

I don’t know how stories are supposed to end. We are in the midst of our lives, when life seems to drift on without us, fading away into the future. Nothing ends. Things dissolve into a new story, someone else’s story. What happened to Mackenzie Philips and his crazy death lock with God? Was Tom...

Charlie laughed. “I was institutionalized a few times.”“Insane asylum.”“A hospital. They say that I was wired wrong. They put me on different drugs trying to set me right. Sometimes they worked. For a while. Sometimes they didn’t work at all.”They were silent for some time.“What’s...

“Trust me, Father, God hates me. He tried to kill me when I was born. My head was too big and my mother almost died. They had to use clamps on my head but the clamps broke so they cut into my mother’s bones. It was a real mess. The doctors figured I would have brain damage. I was tested. They...

"I can hear her coming. A powerful roar from a great distance. , Her craggy pot-marked face smoking, the long tail of fog trailing behind. She will come tumbling toward us like a snowball of fire hurled by a spiteful Santa Claus. Her voice. Not soft and comforting, but a voice dripping with rage....

The moon slept in its garden. Clouds as thin as lace were tangled in the treetops. Bats flickered in and out of the high branches. Down below in the long grass the crickets were too loud. Two teeth shone like nuggets in the dirt. The headlights from the Jaguar crawled across a young woman who lay...

A life of ambition leads a great man to destroy everything around him.

“Leaving T.O. Train shivering between the rails. Wheels and rails grinding their teeth. IMPSTONE. A book of poems keeps tapping on my eyelids. Like rain on a tin roof. A commercial from Eden in Morse Code. Clattering of train. Percolates. Miles through my spine. The photo of Susan Musgrave on the...

The Exhibition is a story written like an Brueghel painting. Time turns on itself. Events are repeated and altered. Characters both dead and imaginary appear. At the core of the story is an exhibition of paintings. The paintings tell the story of the moments before, after, and surrounding the events...

There is a special place in hell for mothers. It is on Earth. Doreen Henderson lingered for months in a dark place few could understand. The psychiatrists called it post-traumatic syndrome. A young woman, the widow slipped into middle-age over night. It was as if Doreen’s world had died on her that...

Death comes in the quiet of our thoughts. When we were looking the wrong way. At the moon being smothered by a cloud. It begins in panic. Thrashing out. We want to live. Something standing over us. Waiting for our last breath. Murder. Now and then.

Its odd being dead. Not what I expected. Like waiting in a doctor's office. Reading old magazines. But I'm here for a purpose. To help Sam move on. That’s my husband standing there next to the compost looking at his pipe. Sam. It’s gone out again. What possibly could be pleasurable about smoking...

A finalist in the 2003 Eppie Best Poetry Collection, Church Street Is Burning, in illustrations, short stories, and poems, tells the story of the poet as a young man. Lost. Abandoned by the woman he loved. Bewitched by the street he lives on. Forgotten by his God. Searching for some rational order in a world fallen on its side. And leaking.

The rain was black. Glistening asphalt like an engagement ring. Moon shattered in the puddles of shame, shards in the faces of pools. Motor oil slicks, cheap impressionistic cringes. Two dancers , Everest and Edna McGuire. The gentleman wore white. His lover wore red, glided across the parking lot....

Living on the streets of Toronto, making friends with the druggies, hookers, pizza makers, bus drivers, CBC employees, winos, and people of God, all of them with stories to tell. Sometimes they talk your head off, other times they can't be bothered, so in a hurry to get on with life. It was exciting....