Watch the video of the Winnipeg launch of FIRE MONSTER HERE.
In Fire Monster, a skilled oil sands worker with a troubled past returns, in the wake of his mother’s death, to the Cape Breton fishing village where he grew up. Set in a fictional version of the real Main-à-Dieu, Nova Scotia—where, in June, 1976, a wildfire did indeed cause devastation—the story animates the complexities of life in a once-thriving east-coast community. Its cast of compelling characters—among them a menacing seal, a ghost and an all-seeing gull—navigate the years of rebuilding amid the memories, questions, and regrets that arise, and sometimes persist, in the wake of life-altering events.
A collaboration with accomplished poet Anita Lahey, Fire Monster achieves a mash-up of forms that’s unique. This absorbing and powerful novel is neither an “illustration” of poetry akin to the “Comics Poetry” genre, nor is it a graphic work that leans chiefly on visuals for impact. Plot progresses in both word and image. The text of richly textured poems and poetic dialogue—much of it playful, capturing regional cadences, and with a suite of songs mixed in (one of which, so far, has been recorded)—is heightened, recast or nudged in unexpected directions by the artwork. Rhyme, metaphor, facial expressions, landscape, weather, speech, streetscape, body language, shoreline, the music of the poetic line and the magic of the sketched line mingle and collide.
For all its vibrant interplay between picture and word, at its core, Fire Monster is an old-fashioned story for the ages: a tale of the frayed bonds of friendship and family, and love’s redemptive power. No lives were lost in the real Main-à-Dieu fire, but its legacy lives on in the changed landscape that, four decades later, still bears scars. As a wildfire can spur renewal in a forest, the fire offered the real village and its residents—and our fictional counterparts—a chance to start fresh. But Main-à-Dieu had long existed on the economic margins and now, the village is diminished by a less dramatic but no less formidable force, that which is gutting small coastal communities all over Canada: the exodus of younger generations. We have drawn on a mixture of personal history (the home of Lahey’s paternal grandparents was lost in the fire, and she maintains strong ties to the community), imagination, and research to create an archetype of this 250-year-old fishing village and its story: the lingering power a dramatic event such as the fire may have over the psyche of a place; the struggle a place sometimes has to remain a “place” at all.
Fire Monster available from Palimpsest Press!
Attend our first launch event in Winnipeg on June 10th, 2023 at McNally Robinson Books, or watch it on youTube! Details HERE.