Coming Soon: Gord Zajac Wreaks Some Major Karnage

Major John Karnage, grizzled veteran of a near-apocalyptic war now 20 years in the past, sits rotting in a state asylum, his unique gifts for violence and mayhem a danger to the peace-loving society he and his soldiers helped create. But when a violent interstellar army threatens to wipe out humanity, the powers that be are forced to unleash Karnage and his men for one last mission: to save the world.

Author Gord Zajac spins an increasingly surreal and hilarious satire of corporatism, government, and the military from this B-movie premise for his debut novel, Major Karnage. Torontoist spoke with Zajac about his long-simmering sci-fi satire in this, the latest installment of Coming Soon.

Torontoist: Give us your one-sentence pitch for the new book.

Gord Zajac: Major Karnage is a science fictional social satire that’s equal parts Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland, and every B-movie you have ever seen (and adored).

Torontoist: How long have you been working on this book?

GZ: Not very long. About 15 years.

Torontoist: Tell us a little about the editorial process. Did anything surprise you about the process?

GZ: I think what surprised me more than anything was how painless the whole process was. My editor, Helen Marshall, was like a skilled neurosurgeon. She deftly sliced out the cancers while leaving all the healthy grey matter intact. I am pleased to say I survived the entire procedure with a minimum of side effects. Occasionally I am overwhelmed by the smell of burnt toast, usually when I first fire up my word processor.

Torontoist: How did it feel when the final galleys arrived at your door?

GZ: I was excited, nauseous, and terrified all at the same time. Much how I imagine Dr. Frankenstein felt soon after bringing his monster to life. “Dear god, what have I unleashed upon this earth?!” Fortunately, the torch-wielding townspeople haven’t stormed through my front door…yet.

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Of Carnivores and Hurricanes: A Conversation with Mark Sinnett

On October 15, 1954, Hurricane Hazel struck the already rain-drenched towns and cities of Southern Ontario, killing 81 people (most of them in Toronto) and causing, in today’s dollars, 1.1 billion in damages. The now iconic storm serves as a backdrop and narrative catalyst for Mark Sinnett’s novel The Carnivore, one of five books nominated for this year’s Toronto Book Awards, which will be handed out on October 14 (for a list of the nominees go here). The novel is told by the voices of a long-married couple both obsessing over the night of the storm, during which the husband, a young police officer, may or may not have committed an act of heroism that makes the front pages of Toronto’s newspapers.

As part of the promotion package for The Carnivore, ECW Press have made a fascinating interactive map that allows users to click on the novel’s many historical and contemporary Toronto locations. Click on the Gladstone Hotel entry, for instance, and you can read the matching entry from the novel and see a view of the venerated hotel circa 1951.

Torontoist spoke with Mark Sinnett about The Carnivore and Hurricane Hazel.

Torontoist: When did you start to become interested in Hurricane Hazel? What was it about the storm that held your attention for so long?

Mark Sinnett: I was planning originally to write about another storm, this one in 1952 in Lynmouth, Devon. A river washed over a hillside village causing a similar sort of havoc to that found in Toronto two years later. At least the pictorial evidence was remarkably similar—houses uprooted, men perched atop massive boulders carried into town, that sort of thing. Anyway, at some point during the research for that novel I came across the Hurricane Hazel story. I was living in Toronto at the time and it just made sense to shift focus. I wanted also to try to understand Canada a bit better. I’ve told this story before but it’s true that even now, 30 years after arriving in this country, I still have a tendency to look to the U.K for my news, my sports, my books, and my music. I thought by writing about Toronto I might be able to shake off the nostalgic way I was living my life. Or at least prevent more of a retreat.

Torontoist: Did you conceive of the novel’s plot before you decided to set it in 1950s (and contemporary Toronto)?

MS: No, I don’t remember where the plot came from. I think it came out of the research I did on the storm. I spent a lot of time going through old newspaper reports in the Toronto Reference library. To start, I knew only that I wanted to alternate two first-person voices, a married couple arguing for their version of history. Julian Barnes did the same sort of thing in Talking it Over, a book I admire.

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Chimerascopes and Other Myths: An Interview with Douglas Smith

Most science-fiction, fantasy, and horror fans can point to an early discovery period during which they came to their genre, but for prolific Toronto writer Douglas Smith, author of the recent short story collection Chimerascope, it seems fitting that he had not one, but two significant exploratory phases for his field. “When I was eight, a friend introduced me to Robert A. Heinlein’s young-adult SF novels,” Smith recalls. “They were essentially rocket and ray-gun books aimed at young boys. I devoured all of those, but then stopped reading the genre. Then in Grade 11, I had to do a paper in English comparing the works of multiple authors. Amazingly, the teacher actually included a group consisting of Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury, which, of course, was the group I picked. That assignment got me back into reading SF and fantasy.”

Bradbury in particular would become a major influence on Smith’s writing, along with Ernest Hemingway and Roger Zelazny. “I love stories that show something fantastical hiding in our everyday lives,” says Smith, “and Bradbury’s stories are often about that, whether the hidden mystery is wondrous or frightening. I love his lyrical prose style, the simple humanity of his characters, and his insight into what it means to be human, no matter what our age.” Smith also admires how Bradbury’s books seem to grow along with the reader. “I reread Something Wicked This Way Comes recently. When I’d read it as a teenager, I remember loving the book and the kid characters, but not really ‘getting’ the father. Reading it now, as a father, I realize that Bradbury really understood both generations and the changes, choices, and regrets that come with age.” He says that he came to Hemingway later, “after he was out of fashion, but his prose style amazed me, the way he could say so much by saying so little, and often communicating as much by what he left out, by what his characters didn’t discuss, as what he put on the page.”

But the influence of Roger Zelazny can be clearly seen in Smith’s use of myth throughout his fiction. “Roger Zelazny’s stories are often based on mythology, and I’ve always loved myths—Greek, Norse, Egyptian, Native American,” says Smith. “His prose style was lean but poetic, his stories poignant and filled with unique characters that you just wanted to spend time with, and his story ideas showed the most fantastic range of imagination of any writer I’ve ever encountered. He died from cancer in 1995 at age 56, and his death was one of the reasons that I decided to stop saying ‘someday’ and started writing myself.”

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Coming Soon: Tony Burgess’s People Still Live in Cashtown Corners

Bob Clark, owner of the local gas station/convenience store, is the sole inhabitant of the tiny town of Cashtown Corners—or so it says in the county clerk’s office. Bob is beginning to suspect otherwise. Horrified by a series of compulsive murders he cannot stop himself from committing, Bob has all but split into two distinct personalities, making the gas station counter a slightly less lonely place.

Tony Burgess’s new novella, People Still Live in Cashtown Corners, elevates this simple premise into an odyssey of metaphysical alienation that doesn’t skimp on the horror-show thrills (Burgess’s protagonist shares the same name as Bob Clark, the director of the original Black Christmas and Deathdream). The novella is being released by Toronto’s ChiZine Publications, who have also just published a limited-edition reissue of Burgess’s Pontypool Changes Everything, the basis for Bruce McDonald’s film Pontypool.

Tony Burgess chatted with Books@Torontoist about People Still Live in Cashtown Corners for the latest edition of Coming Soon.

Torontoist: Give us your one-sentence pitch for the new book.

Tony Burgess: People Still Live in Cashtown Corners is an intimate first-person account of someone who realizes that he must kill others in order to keep his own disintegration at bay and his frantic attempts to rescue secondary versions of himself where this is not true and make them primary.

Torontoist: How long have you been working on this book?

TB: It wasn’t very long in the writing. Much of it was waiting around in the back of my mind for a number of years.

Torontoist: Tell us a little about the editorial process. Did anything surprise you about the process?

TB: For me it’s usually around trying to sort out what parts that don’t make sense did I mean and which parts that don’t makes sense did I just screw up. And sentences too. Some sentences don’t make sense and I need someone to ask me about them.

Torontoist: How did it feel when the final galleys arrived at your door?

TB: Great. Yeah, sure. Brett and Sandra (Chizine’s publishers) make lovely books and Erik Mohr does splendid covers. And in this case there was the black and white glossies that had to tighten the seams of the story in a specific way and Chizine did an excellent job.

Torontoist: Were you tempted to make major changes to the manuscript at this late stage in the game?

TB: No. No. I think if you want major changes at this stage then you’re thinking about a new book. Save it for a new book and let that one be.

Torontoist: Is there anything you wish you’d done differently?

TB: No. No. But then again I like a book to carry a problem or two. I am less sure about what “fixing” is.

Torontoist: What do you think of the cover? How involved were you with the cover process?

TB: We discussed early how the book would look and feel. That it have a true crime body. We talked about the photo in one of those Bernardo books isolating the outlet he plugged a saw into and the weird notion of whoozy continuity that it implied. Things like that and we all seemed to get it fast and, like I said, Erik got it real fast.

Torontoist: What do you hope to achieve with this book?

TB: Get some people to read it and see what they say. I’m curious to hear what people think the book is pointing at.

Torontoist: Are you working on anything new yet?

TB: Yeah. Some film stuff. A book of short stories out with Anvil around the same time as Cashtown called Ravenna Gets and a YA novel with ECW Books coming out next spring called Idaho Winter.