Jay Black

Guttersnipe Jay Black

"He had excused himself from the world without reluctance, remorse, or the sense that his time on Earth had held a shred of redemptive value."




Enter the life of John Richter. Discharged from the Canadian military due to a base closure and locked out of gainful employment because of affirmative action, he stews in resentment at the immigrants, gays, and uppity women taking over his beloved country. When Richter takes a job as a rat exterminator following a garbage workers' strike, his self-delusion, mental illness, and rage at the world lead him down a path to infamy and self-destruction.




Set against the backdrop of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Guttersnipe is a piercing examination of progressivism, multiculturalism, and white male entitlement. Jay Black's debut novella is an uncomfortable look at the men who fall through the cracks and how society's failures can turn the mentally ill into monsters.




Originally published by Black Ink Books in 2004, Guttersnipe was the subject of a hate speech investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. This edition of the book includes an afterword by Black reflecting on the RCMP investigation and his motivations for writing the novella.