fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
This time of year, when the days are growing longer and warmer, my omnipresent-but-oft-latent wanderlust awakens and blooms with the dandelions. Unlike the rebirth of that yellow scourge, I've embraced the urge to travel, especially since Caitlin and I got married in May of 2014. This will be the first year that we've not taken [...]
Until the COVID-19 pandemic altered the entire global landscape, I had planned to post this quick album review on March 19th but then this novel coronavirus began to take over my corner of the world and I had some strong opinions that needed venting. Needless to say, the concert discussed in this review has long [...]
Animal Crossing: New Horizons holds the weird title of being the game of the COVID-19 pandemic. With charming characters, incredibly low stakes and no baseline of gaming skill required, New Horizons is a perfect way for nearly everyone to pass the time during the seemingly endless confinement of social distancing. More than its captivating score [...]
This is exhausting. Just, like, every last bit of it. The emails from coworkers who have lost loved ones, the horror of reading the news each morning to see how high the death toll has climbed, the fear that comes with being caught in a disaster whose endpoint is so completely unknowable, watching friends and [...]
The kitchen was on fire. As a wheelchair-bound raccoon struggled to extinguish the flames, a teal shark chopped a potato, an eyepatch-wearing pirate furiously scrubbed dishes and a clumsy narwhal fell off a bridge to his (temporary) death, taking an order of fish and chips with him to an ironically watery grave. All told, a [...]
If last week's post got a little dark it's only because considering the inability of the sitting American president to adequately guide the American people through the COVID-19 pandemic—a failure to do his job resulting from the sheer force of his staggering incompetence and narcissism—is enough to send me into a depressive thought spiral that I, [...]
Post-apocalyptic fiction rarely focuses on the fall. There's the initial outbreak, the surprising interaction between man and beast or man and nature that introduces some mutagenic pathogen to first one individual and then, rapidly, countless others. Then comes the smash cut to a hollowed out world of ghost towns and ragged survivors, a bombed out [...]
The explosive success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code made him unfathomably wealthy but it also indirectly made him a punching bag for a certain type of literary snob. Yes, that includes me. It's not interesting, especially in 2020, to note that Dan Brown's prose is stilted and awkward, that his descriptions of female [...]
The Queue is a recurring excuse for me to talk about songs or albums in short form. This week I examine the second-best MCR record, a prog rock classic and a dumb pet theory about a beloved indie track. Let’s investigate. The Black Parade – My Chemical Romance It's not that Three Cheers for Sweet [...]
One of the certainties of writing year-end retrospectives—or decade-end ones, if you happen to share my particular brand of lunacy—is that, as soon as you've published your hard-wrought work, you'll find several albums that warrant inclusion on your list but that, for one reason or another, you missed. Maybe you had meant to listen to [...]
Songs & Stories 