As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. This aphorism reveals its many sides in Dead Writers, a collaborative project of four novellas by Jean Marc Ah‑Sen, Michael LaPointe, Cassidy McFadzean, and Naben Ruthnum. Each author puts a unique spin on the concept of the bargain. The result is a collection of intimately told stories in which characters wrestle with seemingly innocent deals and the ethical and emotional fallouts that follow.
To start with the strongest piece, Ruthnum’s “Placeless Delights” opens in the aftermath of the death by suicide of Mushtaq Kabir, a failed novelist whose only book read like “an incel’s picaresque.” Katherine Faber, a successful author in her own right and family friend, reluctantly agrees to work on Mushtaq’s biography at the behest of his mother, Reham. The gig sounds like every writer’s dream: a steady salary, a working space in the Kabirs’ Vancouver mansion, and no obligation to deliver an actual manuscript. All Reham wants is for someone to research her son and consider what a document about his life and legacy might look like. Still, it’s a job Katherine doesn’t relish; she admits that she “can’t write a barbless paragraph about him.” In recent years, Mushtaq’s relationship with Katherine was alternately obsessive and antagonistic. And to everyone else in their community, he was violent, arrogant, and controversial.
Ruthnum sketches a portrait of how damaged people can permanently corrupt the lives of those around them, even after they’re gone. While Katherine’s loathing for her subject is palpable, she worries about his family, now isolated and grieving. Reham, a widow, haunts her palatial home like a ghost. Mushtaq’s elusive brother, Aamir, appears occasionally. His character feels perfunctory until he forms an unexpected bond with the struggling biographer.
“Placeless Delights” posits that reflecting on and rationalizing the memory of a difficult person helps neither side come to peace. Ruthnum crafts a wonderfully flawed protagonist in Katherine, who uses the assignment to run away from her crumbling marriage. At first, she can’t see the extent to which Mushtaq’s toxicity shapes the present. Only when she becomes further enmeshed in the peculiar lives of Reham and Aamir does she begin to understand.
Michael LaPointe also resurrects the past in “The Events at X.” The metafictional tale is presented as a facsimile of a report for the Department of Indian Affairs by the poet Sidney Lawrence, introduced to the reader by his great-grandson (and stand‑in for the author) Michael LaPointe. In 1921, Sidney embarks on a canoe trip in Ontario and Manitoba with a painter, Bertram Bowerstock. After Bertram breaks his leg in an accident, Sidney hauls him through rugged, untamed wilderness until they find an outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company. While waiting for his friend’s injury to heal, Sidney, who has some medical training, is summoned to visit a neighbouring residential school where a mysterious illness has broken out among the students.
As Sidney investigates, he soon discovers both the source of the disease and the institution’s widespread culture of abuse and death. He sees the measures taken to strip the children of their heritage, along with the makings of a scandal should their experiences ever come to light. The moral burden lies heavy on the poet, who is trying to eke out a living while his pregnant wife is at home in Toronto.
LaPointe is startlingly clear-eyed in recreating the problematic perceptions of Indigenous people during the 1920s. “Remember, Doctor, this is a race that would smash its babies against trees when there were too many mouths to feed. They are not precious with life. They have no concept of soul,” says Father Ramage, who runs the corrupt facility. Equally astute is the author’s illustration of the responsibility of bearing witness and how eagerly people can offload that weight. Characters pathologically avoid guilt — whether it’s Agent Godfrey, who works to keep the violence at the school firmly out of view; Father Ramage and his staff, who are righteous and complicit; or Sidney, who is perhaps the most horrifyingly relatable.
The poet’s desire to do the right thing runs up against his unwillingness to risk his comfortable family life and successful career. “I won’t go north again. I want to write verses like these, in a room like this. I want to continue down-river forever,” he says, while explaining the meaning of a poem he has penned in a homeward-bound canoe. Ignorance becomes a consolation as he returns to the city, dutifully files his report, and moves on as if what he saw never existed.
The price of comfort — and the internal dissonance it often requires — comes up in Cassidy McFadzean’s “Getaway for Peace and Tranquility,” which follows a couple during their final days of a Sicilian vacation. A remote rental in Lascari provides pastoral solitude for our unnamed narrator and her husband, Khosrow. The quiet hillside farm full of fruit trees and donkeys promises a chance to unwind from the hustle and bustle of the resort town of Taormina before they return to Canada.
Their plans are loose: visit the adjoining village, hit the beach, and take in a nearby UNESCO heritage site. Shortly after their arrival, however, an uneasiness begins to fester between them. Unsettling behaviour from their host, Carmela, produces an atmosphere of paranoia. They have sex, but real intimacy and communication feel impossible. Animals start acting strangely around them. Other bad omens abound — including nightmares, cockroaches, and rotting fruit — all pointing to something sinister lurking below the surface. Cleverly playing with horror motifs, McFadzean examines someone desperate to recalibrate after unknowingly experiencing a significant change. “I worried the source of my anxiety was not traceable to anything external, but something emanating from within, an inherent distrust of the world that could not be reconciled,” the narrator says. If you can’t trust what’s around you, what’s left?
Indeed, you can be deceived before your very eyes, as Jean Marc Ah‑Sen demonstrates in the experimental final piece, “Praise Dissection Discussion Doubt.” The story begins as an address to an audience in which Novalis, an attention-starved journalist, seeks a conjurer to bring forth a demonic “foeman” that has been plaguing him. Ah‑Sen appears more interested in structure and voice than in story, presenting a conceptual framework that the filmmaker Christopher Nolan might call a “temporal pincer movement,” which eventually brings the plot full circle with some non-linear trickery and manipulation. It’s an intriguing and circuitous puzzle, but baroque prose, coupled with a propensity for meaty wordsmithing and multiple references to the satirical writer Stephen Potter, makes the narrative slippery and difficult. Following three perceptive and provocative entries, Ah‑Sen’s monologue is a confounding, demanding, yet undeniably singular finish.
The omnibus format, by its very nature, can be a roll of the dice for the reader. But Dead Writers offers its pleasures and challenges as a collection in which enjoyment lies in the unexpected.
Kevin Jagernauth is a film critic in Montreal.