“Ghost Hotel”
By Arthur Slade
Published by Shadowpaw Press Reprise
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$14.99
ISBN 978-1-998273-02-7
Ghost Hotel, the 2nd novel in prolific writer Arthur Slade’s Canadian Chills Series, is a spooky send-up for young readers and—abracadabra—it’s just been re-released. If you’re already a Slade fan, you may remember Ghost Hotel. First published in 2004, Shadowpaw Press Reprise has resurrected it … and lucky you if you have yet to discover it. The tone of this supernatural, middle years’ mystery—featuring junior detective friends “Wart” and Cindy—is light-hearted. Though the youthful leads are wise-crackers and the story’s a hoot, the author’s a serious writer with mad skills: you don’t have over thirty novels published if you’re a dabbler.
Disclaimer: I know Arthur Slade. Back in the day, we wrote radio commercials in the same office. I read his first novel, Draugr, when it was still in manuscript form. I attended his wedding. As lovely as these things may be, they don’t matter as far as this review goes, for even if I was inclined to bolster a book on account of a long friendship, there’s no need to here: Slade’s books consistently win awards and fly off the shelves because he is simply a damn good writer. The Saskatoon author earned a Governor General’s Award for his novel Dust, and his name frequently appears on SK Book Award lists.
Ghost Hotel is a Saskatoon-based story concerning Archie (“dressed in a nerdy grey suit-and-tie outfit and a bowler hat that made him look like a mini-version of Charlie Chaplin”), a young ghost who appears to novice sleuths Wart (CEO of the Walter Biggar Bronson Ghost Detective and Time Travel Agency) and his sidekick, Cindy, at Victoria School, post-badminton match. Wart has a few special possessions that would make him the envy of any grade seven student, including a watch that glows “whenever a supernatural presence comes near,” and a cellphone that works even during time travel episodes. Wart comes by his curiosity honestly: his parents are “both mad scientists”. His father suffers from “alienphobia” and wears a tinfoil hat, and his mom, with a PhD in “psychic and supernatural sciences,” has been phobic about vampires “ever since she was attacked by Count Spokula” while the family was on holiday in Transylvania. Why Transylvania? “Cheap flights,” Wart explains.
Kids must love this book. It’s original, funny (the asides are terrific), fast-moving, and—the boy-ghost that leads Wart and Cindy to a 1936-version of the Delta Bessborough aside—Slade’s handling of language and characters is top-notch. The adults are wonderfully weird. There’s a magician whose face is “the colour and texture of mottled Swiss cheese;” a school principal obsessed with toy trains; and a “batty” librarian insists that “every child should read [The Wizard of Oz]”.
Slade takes a self-talking ventriloquist’s dummy (always frightening), loads of “ghost goo,” a time-travelling elevator, and a family’s untimely death in the wintery South Saskatchewan and puts them all—and much more—in the path of two adolescent detectives who are ready to kick some derriere.
Ghost Hotel: hard yes.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“Invasion of the I.Q. Snatchers”
By Arthur Slade
Published by Shadowpaw Press Reprise
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$14.99
ISBN 978-1-998273-04-1
The Canadian Chills Series is a trifecta of amusing middle-grade novels created by Saskatoon’s award-winning Arthur Slade, and I’ve just devoured the Nanaimo Bar-themed Invasion of the I.Q. Snatchers, the third book in the series. As with his earlier books, Slade’s chosen two clever and curious friends—Gordon Whillickers and Sophia Morrison—to team up against a threatening force, and futuristic technology, an amiable Sasquatch, and bizarrely-behaving adults are part of the package. It’s a recipe that works as well as combining custard, a chocolate ganache topping, and a coconut crumb base.
Coastal Nanaimo’s the setting for Slade’s slightly clumsy and seriously science-minded pair. The novel begins thus: “A long, hairy arm reached through my open window and pounded around the top of my desk”. Meet Cheryl, a pink-fingernailed Sasquatch. She’s after the Nanaimo bars someone’s left on the Whillickers’ doorstep, and Gordon has yet to sample. His sassy talking parrot, Archimedes—who’s been listening to “ornithopetic IQ-raising songs” on an MP3 player (this reprinted book initially hit shelves in 2007) and is velcro-strapped into a tiny helmet with a bird cam—takes an investigative flight over Nanaimo’s rooftops and zeroes in on “a pan full of Nanaimo bars, shooting along the sidewalk all on its own”. Say what? In a cliff-hanging line at the end of the third (characteristically) short chapter, Gordon knows “things [are] about to get extremely and utterly weird”.
It seems all of Nanaimo’s received the addictive Nanaimo bars on their doorsteps, along with a compliment: confidant Sophia’s reads “To the smartest girl in Nanaimo;” insert boy for girl, and voilà—Gordon’s note. The kids’ parents haven’t been immune, and after consuming the treats, they’re acting positively Stepfordian: the women wear curlers and are obsessed with vacuuming and watching Coronation Street; the men wear suits and ties, Brylcreem their hair, and watch Front Page Challenge. “All of Nanaimo has gone completely bananas,” Sophia says.
Can the kids discover who is turning
the Nanaimoites into zombies? Is nanotechnology involved? Can Archie help? Who
are the Denebians? And what about that “BHM” (Big Hairy Monster)?
As with Book 2 in this entertaining series, Slade’s had a load of fun with the book’s adults. Gordon’s dad’s an architect who’d “grown a goatee because he thought it would make him look younger,” and Sophia’s dad is a writer who “was never really working but spent most of his time with a cloudy, deep-thought look on his face”.
Slade’s sense of humour is matched by his wild imagination: Cheryl lives on Newcastle Island, and Gordon wonders if she’s “one of those hippie types who never shaves. That would explain the hairy arms”. The story’s interspersed with silly Sasquatch lore, Nanaimo history and landmarks (ie: the Bastion), and Slade’s typical veneration for libraries and librarians.
If zingers like “It turns out that Sasquatches aren’t the greatest drivers in the world” would delight a young person you know, do check out this romp of a book—and Slade’s multiple other titles—at arthurslade.com.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“Realia”
By Michael Trussler
Published by Radiant Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$20.00
ISBN 9-781998-926039
As a longtime reviewer, I occasionally receive a book that I quickly discern will require disproportionate time and patience to digest. If, for example, I don’t know what the title means—ie: Realia, by award-winning Regina poet and nonfiction writer Michael Trussler—I can expect that Google’s going to be my friend. In a review of Trussler’s The History Forest, I suggested that reading his complex work is “like walking through a forest under the cape of night”. I’m still mostly in the dark with his latest work, Realia, but surmise that this very perplexity is indeed the point. Non-sequiturs, unfinished lines, seemingly random symbols, footnotes, bizarre juxtapositions (“History = milkshake duck”) … colouring outside the lines is this writer’s style, and he’s nothing if not consistent. I needed to take a deeper dive.
Trussler’s bio reveals that he’s “neuro-divergent,” and there are references to “phobic anxiety,” “OCD,” and “the psych ward [he] spent a week in downtown”. As I toddled through the pieces—frequently stopping to research names and words—and realized that much of what the poet questions is actually reality, I began to fall under the work’s strange spell and stopped looking for logical connections I might report on, like his litany of technological and cinematic references: microphones, voice-over, documentary, copying machine, TV remote, Zoom, mise en scène, database, televisions, film camera, Netflix, smart phones, iPhone, and various films and actors. Or his connection to colours: “The orange-red eyes of oystercatchers”.
In a formidable poem titled “A Grammar of Spontaneity,” Trussler writes:
a bit sketchy but for starters there’s
been a lot of illness in the Family, the one
real job is
to keep, is to keep, is to
avoid ending
up like your father
There are quotes—sometimes mid-poem—from
a variety of sources (from Hari Kunzru to Rachel Carson to excerpts from the Journal
of Katherine Mansfield), but most of the most effective lines are Trussler’s
own:
the moment in which the patient
remembers the mother-of-pearl cliffs of
sunlight
asleep on a grandmother’s
bathroom floor—
(C.D. Wright quoting another, unnamed
poet’s assertion that “̒Poetry
is speech by someone who is in trouble,’” is also stellar.)
It’s about the journey, here, not the destination. These pieces (the book includes prose essays) never feign to make logical sense: the anxiousness that’s often part and parcel of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is represented in this collection. That Trussler, through these pieces, can make a non-OCD reader feel the experience of a busy and often fearful mind—struggling to ascertain the difference between “common” reality and one’s own reality—is testament to his talent and the works' power.
“Realia,” by the by, has multiple meanings, but most relevant here is this Merriam-Webster adaptation: “̒Realia’ is also sometimes used philosophically to distinguish real things from the theories about them”. Also of note is literary/cultural critic and writer Lauren Berlant’s insightful, book-opening quote: “How does someone stay attached to life while repudiating the world of bad objects?” This question hangs in the air.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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