Reviewed by Heather Campbell
We Had it Coming and other fictions
by Luke O’Neil
OR Books
November 2025, Paperback, ISBN 9781682196694, 330 pages
Luke O’Neil’s We Had It Coming is a finely-drawn and rapidly-told portrait of the present moment: current events, economic issues, the effects of the opioid crisis and the flight of manufacturing jobs on rural areas, and the awkward truth of how much time we spend side-by-side with those we care for, separately scrolling.
O’Neil’s work is described as using “inventive syntax,” which the reader will immediately notice: there’s no internal punctuation in the entire collection. Not a single comma, semi-colon, m-dash, in the entire text. While billed as a collection of short fiction, the resulting stream-of-consciousness reads instead more as a series of journal entries, or messages from the most persistent talk-to-texter you know. With little deviation or inflection in voice or character throughout, what we’re given feels less like fiction and more like a chance to watch an acquaintance’s therapy session. The distinctive and persistent voice makes it difficult to imagine that multiple characters are speaking, even though our narrator is seldom identified.
Rather than belabour the syntax, it’s easier to say O’Neil says what he wants to say. There’s a refreshing bluntness that suits the head-on acknowledgment of contemporary self-reflection. Once familiar, the voice is rather comforting, although it tries hard not to be: the perfect clarity of “facedown and clenching the sheets like the napes of two cat necks” is prefaced by the seemingly deliberate difficulty of lines like “Or what it will have always had to have been that you will have always had to have done to me.”
There are very personal themes here, from addiction to self-harm to the small betrayals of habit, when, for example, “not knowing anything better to do in that pocket of time where each spoken sentence was a struck gavel he made everything worse by looking down at his phone.” The narrator seems to frequently pause to look us straight in the eye, for a mid-narrative confession: “I have had this strange tension inside of me for a while now that I can’t relieve myself of by turning it into words which is the course of care that I typically prescribe myself.”
There’s a strong sense of place throughout the collection, but with the shading of resigned desperation, almost as keen as describing a memory while it is still being formed. O’Neil often points to the small tortures of acknowledging the sharpness of reality alongside and our shared passivity: “Being lied to isn’t so bad sometimes compared to being aware of how things actually are. You wouldn’t want to go around like that for very long. No one wants to know all the secrets.” There’s humour as well, even in when reflecting on the destitute, as if watching disaster rolling in and not knowing if it’s staged or not. The tension of waiting for a punchline is soft but unwavering: heat that never breaks; a storm that never settles.
While the collection is very much rooted in the present, the struggles we witness here could have been passed through generations like the seemingly-discarded communities O’Neil let us loiter in. Filled with personal and inter-personal observations and interactions that are deeply perceptive in their quiet moments, We Had it Coming may feel ominous, but its quiet beauty is what the reader is most compellingly left with.
About the reviewer: Heather Campbell is a Montreal-based poet with publications in Grain, Prairie Fire, CV2, The Capilano Review, and PRISM International. Her reviews have appeared in Grist, the Women’s Post and Dance International Magazine.