“Much Abides”

The article demonstrates how Brian Koukol’s Handicapsules: Short Stories of Speculative Crip Lit (2021) is an important corpus of work that represents the emerging genre of crip lit. The article aims to inform the wider understanding of crip knowledge and demonstrate how Koukol’s crip lit provides a platform for individuals who identify as crip to have their unique voices, perspectives, and stories included and valued in mainstream literature. Using Robert McRuer’s and Michael Davidson’s crip theories, the focus is on how crip lit centralizes crip lives by creatively intersecting experiences of disability, gender, economic oppression, and violence. By examining a few of the short stories such as “Circling the Brain,” “A Rock and a Hard Place,” “Useless Eaters,” “Much Abides,” and “Fish in a Barrel,” this article analyses how Koukol’s crip lit seeks to antagonize and illustrate cripped individuals with all of their inherent foibles in the same way as those with chronic good health. Crip lit differs from conventional forms of literature, specifically in the manner that it uses literary techniques such as humour and fantasy to subvert traditional disability tropes and create an unnerving effect on the readers.