Cordelia Strube’s home in Toronto’s east end is, like its owner, unfussy, clean, and spare. Her 10-year-old daughter’s art decorates the bright, sunny rooms, but there’s little of the clutter often associated with family life. The lovely green couch in the wood-floored foyer is decades old – it once belonged to Strube’s parents – and the appliances on her spotless counter, while no doubt still effective, are yellowing with age.

Like the hero of her new novel, Planet Reese, Strube refuses to buy into our disposable culture, in which not-quite-new items are discarded into landfills or put on boats to Africa. But unlike her hero, whose heightened sense of the planet’s jeopardy drives him to the edge of madness, Strube exudes self-possession and humour, welcoming a visitor to her home with fresh-baked cookies and disarming frankness.

Author of seven darkly comic urban novels, the tall, slim, 40-something Strube is something of an endangered species herself: the midlist writer. At one time, well-reviewed authors with loyal, if not large, readerships could dwell securely within the habitat of major publishing houses. But today’s novelist typically has fewer chances to catch fire before publishers grow impatient, and the change has left its mark on Strube’s career. She’s moved from Coach House Books to HarperCollins Canada and from there to Thomas Allen Publishers, publishing two novels at each of them. Planet Reese, though, appears this month with Dundurn Press, a house more used to publishing emerging novelists than established ones. Still, Strube believes readers will find her. “I’d just like to keep quietly publishing books,” says Strube, “and not get caught up in all the other stuff. What is important to me is the writing…. How other people peg me, I have no control over.”

Writing novels was not Strube’s first or even second career. Raised in Montreal, she started out as an actress, eventually working in radio plays. In 1987, she wrote her own radio drama, Mortal. Unable to get it produced, she submitted it to the CBC Literary Awards competition, and won. Strube went on to write nine more radio plays, honing her ability to write dialogue. The pay was surprisingly good – Strube saved enough from radio work and her sideline work as a fitness instructor to buy her current house – but she had little control over the finished product. After hearing the performance of her last play, Marshmallow, in 1990, she says, “I was so shocked and disappointed by the way it was done that I couldn’t write for radio again.”

Eager to work without the interference of producers, actors, and sound crews, she turned to the novel. In her blackly (sometimes bleakly) humorous novels, Strube tends to examine just how bad things can get before (in most cases) they get better. One reviewer described her first book, 1994’s Alex & Zee, as “the feelbad novel of the year.” Strube’s characters suffer: their babies are crushed by television sets, their houses burn down, they lose spouses and jobs, they get cancer, they are molested. This is not escapist fiction; nor is it set in the past, in a quirky rural community, in a young girl’s childhood, or any other typical CanLit milieu. “Contemporary Canadian fiction tends to be very insular,” says Strube. “There’s no reference to the backdrop of our world.” Strube wants to document the time she lives in, and finds herself drawn to the subjects that other authors tend to avoid. “I write about where I see holes, what is not being talked about,” she explains.

In Planet Reese, that includes the unfashionable struggles of divorced dads. Reese Larkin is barred from seeing his kids when his wife suggests to a social worker – inaccurately, but not, as it turns out, maliciously – that he may be molesting their daughter. Unable to protect his own children, he dwells obsessively on all the bad things that happen to kids. Readers may wince at this, since the book seems to revisit every child murder, case of abuse, or tragic, accidental death that has hit the headlines over the past five years.

And then there’s the destruction of the planet. “I wanted to look at environmental degradation in a humorous manner,” Strube says matter-of-factly, giving no hint that she considered her task a quixotic one. She pulls it off by making Reese so relentlessly fixated on the earth’s destruction that even Greenpeace won’t work with him. When Reese is tense or threatened – which is often, considering that he’s getting divorced, looking after his angry parents, and wearing sweaty plastic shoes – he hears the voices of high school teachers in his head, hissing things like “Hel-lo! 42 million kiddies enslaved world wide!!”

Strube’s own inner environmentalist adopts a less strident tone. She drives a hybrid car, buys used clothing, and is an avid composter, and she writes her books on a 1995 Macintosh Performa – the computer equivalent of living off the grid. “It still works,” she says with a shrug. But she also acknowledges the truth in all of the ominous facts racing so compulsively through Reese’s brain. We are killing the planet. Some children do suffer horrifying abuse. “We have to look at our worst fears,” says Strube.

Not everyone shares that conviction. Strube’s mordant take on the anxieties of modern life hasn’t led to huge sales, and she hasn’t given up her night job teaching writing to continuing education students at Ryerson University. She hints that her earlier professional relationships have foundered on a difference of perspective, which Patrick Crean, publisher at Thomas Allen, doesn’t dispute. “I think she is an extraordinarily strong writer [with] an impeccable ear for dialogue,” says Crean. But he was dismayed to see what he calls the “24-hour loop of CityTV News” – the flow of bad news and tragedies – return in the Planet Reese manuscript. “It felt like she was writing the same book over and over again,” says Crean.

Crean’s reservations aside, Planet Reese got multiple offers from smaller houses; Barry Jowett, Strube’s editor at Dundurn, says his company “jumped at the chance to read her manuscript” and expects it to do very well. “If the publisher is not seeing the book that I’m seeing, no matter what your history, it’s going to be hard to move forward,” Strube says. “Because the payoff is small monetarily, I don’t see the point remaining in a situation that is uncomfortable for both parties.”

Indeed, Strube talks about her book earnings as if their very paucity is liberating. Agents, for example, are “really useful if you’re making a lot of dough,” but Strube, who was once represented by Anne McDermid, says she negotiated her last book contract herself. (McDermid did not return calls from Q&Q.) And without a truckload of cash at stake, Strube isn’t tempted to compromise her vision. “It’s the same lousy money, so what’s to be gained?” she asks. “You really have to keep a sense of humour about it and keep an eye on what matters.”

What matters to her is the writing, of course, and the readers who send her letters saying “this is so real, so pertinent to my life.” There’s time with her husband, who works as an office administrator, and the freedom to take her daughter to swimming lessons and karate after school.

And there’s the next book, this one about a teenager obsessed with history. It won’t be what we think of as commercial – “there are so many people who can write those novels that it would be silly for me to try,” she says – but it will find its niche. After all, in her books as in her home, Strube isn’t inclined to discard something that still works.