By TONY BURGESS (ChiZine Publications; 2010)
Here we have a highly literary tale of mass murder told from the killer’s point of view. According to the back cover description it’s “an account of a tragedy we all thought was senseless,” but I’m not sure about that; after reading this book the killings still seem pretty senseless to me!
The narrator is Bob Clark, the troubled owner of a gas station in a tiny Ontario town known as Cashtown Corners. One day Bob goes completely schitz, and, for reasons he himself doesn’t entirely comprehend, strangles a woman patron in her car. He follows this with another equally senseless murder and then a cop killing, which turns him into an immediate fugitive. After a dash through a nearby cornfield Bob winds up in a house whose occupants, a middle-class family, he massacres—and then goes completely bonkers, hallucinating lengthy conversations with his victims’ corpses and relentlessly pondering the minutiae of his actions, with no ready answers available.
This novel, as with Tony Burgess’s previous publications (including PONTYPOOL CHANGES EVERYTHING, the basis of the ‘09 flick PONTYPOOL), is somewhat lacking in narrative clarity (why don’t the police ever search the house where Bob holes up?), with elegantly scatterbrained prose (“The plane, which now waits quietly, still touching the building, has in fact some of the air’s properties and this isn’t an illusion”) and a disarmingly carefree, vaguely sarcastic tone. This makes it difficult to discern whether Burgess’s eccentricities are intended as sincere depictions of the narrator’s deteriorating psyche or mere authorial quirks.
Adding to the weirdness are a section of black and white photographs, allegedly of the crimes and locales depicted in the novel. Also pictured is a World Trade Center birdhouse sculpture made by one of Bob’s victims and an unfinished copy of same, apparently one of several “tributes to a tribute.” This ties in with a reverie Bob has early on involving the events of 9-11. What precisely this juxtaposition might signify (if anything) is, like so much else in these pages, left up to the reader to decide for him/herself.