When Edgar Allen Poe was discovered in front of a tavern in Baltimore supposedly near death, he was not wearing his own clothes, and the body recorded was two inches taller than Poe’s army records. And the photograph of Poe in his coffin doesn’t look like other photographs of the writer, at least not to me.

I didn’t make this up. Nor did I make up the fact that US publishing at the time was essentially in the business of piracy; nor that Poe did hack work for money, including a textbook on seashells. I didn’t make up the scandalous obituary written by Rufus Griswold, the editor who turned Poe the artist into Poe the symptom. Nor did I make up the facts of life in Philadelphia, or the political and social climate before the Civil War. Nor did I make up Charles Dickens’ strange tour of America. (He wrote about it in “American Notes.”) However, other than Poe and Dickens, the characters are all my own creation, as is the plot linking events and kernels of fact. Like my other “period” novels, this is an assembly of found objects like the dots in a children’s drawing puzzle, in which I have joined the dots into a picture that makes some kind of weird sense, at least to me. None of this is about Them or Then, you understand. It’s not history. It’s about Me and Us and Now. I’m like a truffle pig, snouting for resonant facts. My admittedly comic snort at what I find is more of shock than levity.

John MacLachlan Gray

The Victorians invented the concept of childhood innocence, made a fetish out of it, really. And they invented the art of Photography.And so they invented pornography, which depends on visual documentation and wide distribution. It follows, to me at least, that they invented child pornography. Not a huge leap, London was full of child brothel.

Edmund Whitty again, in bad shape. Not by drugs and alcohol this time – he can’t afford them. He is being consistently scooped by his rival Fraser and doesn’t know why.An underworld figure named the Captain holds his gambling marker to the tune of £500. He can avoid dire physical consequences, the Captain informs him, if he`ll harness his talents and locate the Captain`s kidnapped niece. He has a terrible time. He is kidnapped, jailed, repeatedly beaten and nearly hanged, twice. Worse, he thinks he might have encountered the ghost of his dead brother. The search takes him to Oxford, where he encounters a writer of children’s books, and the amazing girl he loves. The similarity to Lewis Carroll is intentional. I only hope I got him right....more

“The Fiend In Human” is a bit like distressed leather or sanded denim – something new made to look like something old.

 

It is 1852 in London, the details are authentic I assure you (as is the writing style, some don’t like that), while the issues and events are drawn from specifics of today. On one level it’s a serial killer novel inspired, not by the Ripper, but by the killing of up to 50 prostitutes in Vancouver, Canada in the late 1990s, whose disappeances were ignored by police because they were, after all, fallen women.

Our hero is a media hound with an alcohol and drug problem. The city is in the midst of a crime epidemic. A killer chokes his victims with a white scarf, seemingly at random. A street peddler of sensationalism, is trying to support his smart daughter and his beautiful charge, and is losing control as they acquire street-smarts on their own. A fascistic policeman. A whipping establishment on Portland place, called The Grove Of The Evangelist. A pair of Victorian gen-X’ers, just looking for a good time.....more

Reviews

Reviews

An Irreverent History of the Tattoo

Tattooing is an ancient yet living artifact with an utterly consistent, utterly paradoxical significance - as a charm and as a curse. When Cain murdered Abel, the Lord “put a mark” on Cain - that nobody would harm him.

It is surely no coincidence that modern stencil tattooing was pioneered by a Bowery tattooist named Lou the Jew Albert, who had worked as a wallpaper designer.

The Imaginary Canadian In The American Dream

A series of essays on the Canadian way of life. An answer to the question, “What’s it like and why is it like that?”

A testy love letter.

I don’t know who would want to read a musical. On the other hand, I spent more time on the librettos than the tunes, which I usually wrote while riding a bicycle. So I tried to make it worthwhile with three essays on where they came from, so that the reader is in on something and the librettos make sense in their own way.

People don’t think of musicals as being as “serious” as plays, but to me the musical is a play with poetry and music. The scenes aren’t bridges between songs, it’s the other way around. To me the singing of a song can be like a soliloquy from Shakespeare; a summing-up of something. Or it can be the moment where you drop the theme like a stone into a pond. Or it can suggest an environment, an era, a way of looking at things in a distilled way.

18 Wheels was my first musical, and it shows. A homage to truck drivers, country music, and the Canadian landscape. I wrote it in rhyme and with more or less continuous music, songs patterned after Red Sovine and narration in the style of Phantom 309. The musical is still performed, I think because it appeals to people who find plays embarrassingly voyeuristic. Outside the major centers, people are more comfortable with the oral tradition of the storyteller...more

You’ll never find this one, it went out of print almost the moment it was released. However, people who read it said they laughed out loud, and it’s not often you laugh out loud, reading a book. A satire set in Vancouver in 1974, about Hippie culture, the coming Reagan era, the explosion of mass media, and the men’s clothing business.

First line: “I was an asshole in 1974.” In 1974 I worked six months as a salesman for Fred Asher Stores for Men. It was the only full-time job I have ever had, and I never got over it.