The stories in Vermin are linked by themes of loss, longing and music: a restaurant server in a Tofino restaurant reflects on the nature of men in her past and present; a woman prepares to marry a brooding artist unpopular with both her parents and her small town community; a new homeowner has strange encounters witha previous owner who is struggling to let go. Stories in this collection have appeared in Joyland, The Saturday Evening Post, Room, The Antigonish Review and other journals and anthologies....part of the strength in Hahnel's often funny, occasionally sad and always intriguing collection is that they take readers in all sorts of directions.” – Calgary Herald“Hahnel is keenly aware of the daily suffering of life, and once in a while, of the sought-for moments of forgetfulness of a troubled place, or of a desperate, short-lived bliss. But there are no lyric flights here, the prose is unadorned, straight-forward and clear, what is unsaid often more important than what is, and her characters are on the move, often aimlessly, from one unsatisfactory situation to another, while their friends become drifters and vanish and reappear and vanish again. These are touching, gen