Curtis John McRae's Quietly, Loving Everyone

Reviewed by Elena Sénéchal-Becker

(Véhicule Press, 2025)

On a warm night in late June, I attended the release of Curtis John McRae’s debut collection of short stories, Quietly, Loving Everyone, at a bar in Montreal. The room was packed, owing likely to McRae’s long-time Montrealer status, as well as his position at Yolk Literary Journal, which have made him somewhat of a darling of Montreal’s anglophone literary scene.

That evening, McRae read from a story titled “Hotel Viviane”. The title alone caught me off guard, selfishly, because my own grandmother—my tie to Montreal, when I was growing up—was named Viviane. She died during the pandemic in 2021, and the name is uncommon enough that hearing it aloud made the story feel personally charged before it had even begun. I suppose I was primed for intimacy, and McRae’s collection delivered.

A few weeks later, when a friend spotted the book in my bag as I was parsing it for this review and asked what I thought, the first phrase that came to mind was “carefully considered.”  It is wholly apparent that McRae has spent a lot of time on this book. Each sentence is deliberately constructed, each story arc painstakingly sketched to form a perfect circle. The language is approachable enough to draw in the reader while still leaning towards the literary. It’s a pleasure to read, and I suspect it would appeal to a wide audience.

The eleven stories in Quietly, Loving Everyone move like ripples across water: subtle, insistent, spreading outward from moments of grief, longing, and human connection. It is not a loud book. Instead, it asks the reader to lean in, to slow down, to pay attention. At its heart, the collection is an exploration of how people live with grief—sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely—but always in ways tethered to ebbs and flows of daily life. The characters populating these stories are flawed, though McRae rarely announces their flaws upfront. Instead, he writes them as if they were half-buried fossils, gradually revealed as the narrative brushes away layer after layer. The reader comes to know them not through dramatic revelations but through accumulations of gestures, and moments of tenderness.

Although Montreal threads through the collection—most recognizably in Love Cinema, which references the city’s local porn theater, Cinema L’Amour—McRae’s settings are more atmospheric than geographic. They evoke the city without being bound to it and explore some lesser-known corners of the Canadian landscape, as well. This looseness allows the stories to feel recognizable to Montrealers, but not alienating to those elsewhere. As a newcomer to Montreal myself, I was happy to explore the city through McRae’s characters, learning tidbits I wouldn’t have known otherwise.

McRae’s greatest strength lies in his masterful crafting of beginnings and endings. For example, the collection’s first story, “Hotel Viviane” opens with the devastating line: “The worst part was the feeling that it would never stop.” McRae pulls the reader immediately into unease without explanation, an effective use of beginning in situ. In “Hundred-Year Flood Line”, the first line,  “When I invited Don to stay for dinner, something in his face changed,” invites us into a climate of suspicion and discord in just a few words. 

A handful of stories sag in the middle, as though McRae briefly loses narrative momentum. The language remains sharp, but the energy dips, and I sometimes wished for more propulsion. Likewise, the thematic weight of the book can feel unrelenting. Grief is its central concern, and while McRae treats it with nuance and compassion, the cumulative effect can be emotionally dense. I wonder what his prose might look like if it stretched into lighter registers, to explore joy or humor with the same attentiveness. Still, if grief is McRae’s chosen medium, he has certainly mastered it.
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The collection shines most is in its depictions of improbable intimacy, as well as shared trauma captured through different points of view. McRae’s writing adeptly demonstrates the fragile ways people connect—through fleeting encounters, sometimes imbued with awkwardness or accidental vulnerability. He understands that intimacy often resides not in grand declarations but in small, almost imperceptible shifts between people. A dinner invitation, a glance across a room, a hand held a moment too long: these are the currents that drive his stories forward.

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​Elena Sénéchal-Becker (she/her) is a writer and researcher living in Montréal. She runs a workshop for queer writers in Toronto, and is a PhD student at McGill University.