Dustin Cole

Notice

Dustin Cole

The context is Summer 2017, Vancouver, British Columbia, where economic imperatives are making space less and less accessible to lower-income individuals. The rental crisis is intensifying, ravenous real estate development is thriving and there is a province-wide forest fire emergency, which blankets the city in smoke. The protagonist, Dylan Levett, is a recent university graduate being “renovicted” from his rent-controlled apartment, the central point of view of the story. Notice is a Kafkaesque story about a man caught in the gears of a bureaucracy, a spiral-down, bad-to-worse kind of story. Socially relevant, this is a funhouse mirror held up to Vancouver, a working-class story that stands apart with its composite of literary techniques. Overall, Notice focuses on displacement and petty frustration, applying a documentary sensibility to an original and topical scenario.