We Regret to Inform You that communication is hard for the characters in Tim Fredrick's collection

Tim Fredrick proves himself to be a risk-taker as a writer. In his collection of short stories, WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU, Fredrick tackles a number of character voices and a variety of short fiction styles, but the theme that runs through many of these tales is a sense of just how difficult it is for Joe Everyman to express himself.

"We regret to inform you" might have come from a number of his characters' mouths.  In each case, the act of speaking is itself an act of regret. In "By the Stream on Moving Day," his protagonist feels the ache implicit in the definition of nostalgia when he meets up with his childhood best friend, Henry, who, on their last day together as kids, put his toe in the water, testing whether what Henry felt was sexual love. When the narrator, who may be named "Buddy," hears Henry admit that this may have been the moment when he realized he was gay, Buddy chokes on a piece of ice, incapable of revealing whether he felt the same way. In "Egg and Spoon," Jim seeks a Guinness World Record and his brother's affection by carrying an egg in a spoon around and around the local high school track. And in "Thawed," my favourite story, Fredrick imagines that while hundred-year old corpses brought back from being cryogenically frozen may be cured of the disease that would have killed them, the process can do nothing to cure the prejudices they went into suspended animation with.

Fredrick plays with second person narration in "A Tale of Five Thousand Erections," which is great, unless the you being addressed is female. "This One Night in the Bar Where I Work's" stream-of-consciouness narration feels shallow, until you realize that the fight at the center of it is itself banal.

Overall, Fredrick shows terrific promise as a storyteller, and I'm curious to see where his writing takes him next. One thing is for sure, Fredrick is not limited by the boundaries of gender and sexuality. He tries on different writing styles as one does clothes--some of the pieces are not all that flattering, but at the end of the day, there's an eclectic wardrobe filling the shelf.