Zak Jones' ​Fancy Gap

Reviewed by Josh Quirion

(Penguin Random House Canada, 2026)

Zak Jones’ debut novel Fancy Gap is a three-part story told from the alternating perspectives of five characters who are–or were–family. Grace, the eccentric evangelist who preaches up on the mountain; Jane, Grace’s daughter, who battles sickness in the form of addiction and cancer; Dalton, Jane’s son, dishonorably discharged from the military and drifting across the Midwest, slowly making his way home; Messiah, Dalton’s younger brother, who is quiet and desperate for connection; and Clyde, Jane’s ex-husband, who moved into the mountains with Grace’s flock.

Yes, that Grace. Jane’s mom. A bizarre living arrangement, to be sure. When it comes to Grace, bizarre is but the sweet in her tea. She preaches to destitute families and nationalist militiamen alike in an orchard under the open sky. She incants their saviour’s name wildly and thrashes about like a thing possessed, speaking in tongues and condemning the modern world of sinners below the mountains, calling for a cleanse, a new world, an Eden, there in southern Appalachian mountain ranges of West Virginia. Traditional churchgoers may not recognize the tenor of Grace’s passionate sermons–moving and violent and terrifying, fire cauterizing wounds. She is the “Shepherd” everything orbits around, a magnetic pull drawing lost souls. Her daughter’s ex-husband Clyde is a lapdog blindly devoted to her. Messiah does her dirty work, the work of the Lord. Dalton knows nothing good awaits him back home, but Grace’s draw is mystical and strong, and he must get back to his little brother.

Such is the table Zak Jones has set.

You know the trick where one swiftly pulls a tablecloth from a table and everything on the table stays more or less in place? Well, in Fancy Gap, the things on the table are the five characters, and the tablecloth is generational trauma woven so deeply into its fabric that you might not even see it. What Jones does, instead of pulling it really swiftly, is tug at it ever so slowly, maintaining eye contact with you all the while. Then, when it’s about halfway off the table and things are broken and the blood of Christ is dripping onto the floor, he pours kerosene over what remains and sets it ablaze, legs and all.

It is an unnerving and frustrating story. We feel compassion for the characters because of their heavy histories, their difficult circumstances. But being witness to such a persistent and seemingly fated string of poor decision-making is like being in a dream where you need to run but are stuck neck-deep in molasses, naked. This story is old school. It’s more rotary phone than cellphone, more freight train than Tesla. It’s heavy and wet and compulsive. 
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Zak Jones can write, that much is certain. So well, in fact, that my only disappointment with Fancy Gap is the short, interspersed chapters told from alternating perspectives. He could have foregone that fragmented structure and combined storylines–let me figure out who’s who and what’s what. On the other hand, I wonder and am even led to believe the structure is deliberate and used to demonstrate the characters’ isolation, their separation from one another made manifest within the geography of the pages themselves. The final chapter is called “Together”, after all, and in that final scene, the convergence of the cast of characters makes way for the type of climax that flattens mountains and blacks out the sun. 

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Josh Quirion is a French-Canadian writer from the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Canada. He holds an M.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from Concordia University. He is the co-founder and original editor-in-chief of Montreal literary magazine, yolk. His writing has appeared in The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, and The Antigonish Review, and others. He is the author of two short story collections: Towners & Other Stories (Shoreline Press, 2020) and Homebound (Shoreline Press, 2025), which was longlisted for the Leacock Medal for Humor.