One of the best things about shorter days and longer nights in the fall is that when you go for evening walks in the dark, it’s easier to spy into your neighbours’ homes through their lit windows.

Or, you could save yourself the trouble, and crack Clea Young’s subtle but powerful new collection of short stories. “Welcome to the Neighbourhood” opens front doors, pulls back the living room curtains, and cracks open bedroom shutters to shed light on just how extraordinary ordinary people really are.

The stories are set against the lush, salt-misted backdrop of Vancouver and the surrounding mountains, but the true weather here is inner life—grief, jealousy, tenderness, loneliness, and the awkward bravery it can take to get through a day.

Young’s characters aren’t perfect, and that’s the point. There’s arrogance, insecurity and bad behavior mixed up with good intentions, kindnesses, love and clothing exchanges. There is addiction and contradiction. Snooping, judging and cheating. Neighbours strain against each other, friends have falling outs, and strangers share intimacies they never intended. These are people—mostly, but not all, women—who make mistakes, sometimes spectacularly. Young writes them with such precision and empathy, you can’t help but care.

Her prose is agile, moving from hilarious banter to luminous description, as characters stumble to find meaning and connection. Some stories, like Crows, Kittens and Mint Juleps, zip back in time to a childhood of wild dreams and broken friendships. In the story In Loco Parentis, Teja is an Education Assistant whose spontaneous interaction with a special-needs child is caught on video. In Hyacynth, a lonely man conjures a relationship with a clerk at Costco; she works hard to rebuff him. In the title story, Welcome to the Neighbourhood, an invitation thrown out at a strata meeting turns horrifying.

In Weekend Guest, the narrator is on an isolated beach with her new friend Holly, and Holly’s surly, teenaged daughter Fiona. The narrator takes a cold dip and contemplates Fiona from a new perspective:

“I went under held my breath. My skin tightened around my bones and my brain emptied of everything but elemental shock. Sweet summer. Dull bliss. This was exactly what I needed. My reset button pressed. My judgements overturned like buckets of sand. Why should Fiona be polite in the way I wanted her to be? Why wish away her self-centredness? Holly was right; it would strip away from her soon enough, and wasn’t it a mesmerizing study in the meantime? What advice did I have to give? You are lovely now but it won’t last. Don’t squander your beauty, but do share it—with the right people. Don’t invest in it, because it isn’t yours to keep. No, these were things she had to learn on her own.

I regained my footing and looked back toward the shore. Fiona had usurped my place on the blanket, head in Holly’s lap. My body tingled. Oh, to not have a body. To not care about being seen.”

In The Intruder, the narrator wakes up to find a stranger—barefoot, with a shaved head, wearing nothing but a crinoline—has entered her kitchen early one morning through an unlocked door. The narrator initially thinks the intruder is her daughter, home from a night with a boyfriend. She eventually hopes the intruder will give her daughter some “life advice.”

“I don’t know you,” I said, “so it’s time for you to leave.”

“I live on First Ave.,” she said. “Not far from here, but I can’t go back. It’s not safe.”

“Get out,” I said, the uncharitable words popping from my mouth like hot rocks from a fire. “Get. Out.”

She opened the door and stepped outside, onto the welcome mat. Looking down at her bare feet she said, “I need help,” as if she were embarrassed, for me, at having to state the obvious.

“I could call the police,” I said, letting the screen door slap shut between us.

“Please. Don’t.”

I knew the area of First Ave. she was referring to, a relatively new block of transitional housing, a ten-minute walk from my door. Recently, I’d overheard a neighbour complaining about the influx of destitute souls trawling our walkways for strollers and poorly secured bikes. I didn’t ask how he knew, but he said the VPD had visited that address seven hundred times already this year.

“They might help,” I said, though clearly the woman knew better than I what the police could or couldn’t do for her.”

Ever present social media static, economic uncertainty, and ecological threats are inescapable in Young’s neighbourhood, but the real drama here is intimate: a gaze held too long, a kind gesture misinterpreted, a friendly offer that conceals resentment, the emotional insecurity that drives us all slightly crazy. The collection captures that awkward truth that proximity does not always make connection easier—it often sharpens the edges.

Not every story lands with the same punch, but even the quieter ones hum with resonance. When the book ended, I was left wondering about these characters as though they really did live just around the corner. And whether I’d dare knock on their door.

Clea Young’s stories have been included in Best Canadian Stories 2025 and three volumes of The Journey Prize Stories. Her work has appeared in Event, Grain, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire and Room. Her first collection of stories, Teardown, was published in October 2016 with Freehand Books and her second collection, Welcome to the Neighbourhood was published by House of Anansi Press in 2025. Clea completed an MFA at the University of British Columbia and lives in Squamish, BC.

Young appears in Camouflage and Connection: A Conversation with Writers of Fiction on Nov. 1 at 10:15 a.m. at the Fairmont.

Review is by Katherine Fawcett. She is a Squamish-based author, teacher and musician. She is more of a crossword puzzle than a Sudoko person, but will drop both for a game of cards. Her latest book is The Swan Suit. Watch for her short fiction in the Pique Newsmagazine’s Halloween edition.