
"Though the four novellas comprising Dead Writers vary tremendously in style and subject matter, they all evoke a delicious, spine-tingling sense of dread. These tales take readers on a head spinning journey through the inner workings of a cruel colonial school, all the way to a creepy contemporary vacation rental, never losing sight of the selfish, unscrupulous, and inescapable aspects of human behaviour. This is a collection that will keep you turning pages, but that will also make you wonder: Are the pages turning you?"--Allegra Hyde, author of The Last Catastrophe
In this collaborative fiction project, four writers navigate the protean concept of the "bargain" in novella-length stories. A biographer surveying the career of a "haunted" literary figure, a lovelorn journalist entering into a diabolic covenant, a tourist attempting to stay sober through her holiday travels, and a doctor's complicity in a colonial scandal: These horror-inflected offerings of existential dread, tainted pasts, and uncertain futures serve as an unbalancing reminder that there is always a high price to pay for the corruption of the soul.
Jean Marc Ah-Sen is the author of Grand Menteur, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation, and Kilworthy Tanner. His writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Catapult, The Comics Journal, Hazlitt, Maclean's, and elsewhere. The National Post has hailed his writing as "an inventive escape from the conventional."
Cassidy McFadzean is the author of three books of poetry: Crying Dress (House of Anansi, 2024), Drolleries (McClelland & Stewart, 2019), shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, and Hacker Packer (M&S, 2015), winner of two Saskatchewan Book Awards and finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her fiction has appeared in carte blanche, Joyland, Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, and Prism International.
Naben Ruthnum is a Toronto-based author of fiction and criticism. He is the author of Helpmeet, The Grimmer, and A Hero of Our Time.
Michael LaPointe is the author of The Creep (Random House Canada, 2021). He has written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and he was a columnist for The Paris Review.
"Though the four novellas comprising Dead Writers vary tremendously in style and subject matter, they all evoke a delicious, spine-tingling sense of dread. These tales take readers on a head spinning journey through the inner workings of a cruel colonial school, all the way to a creepy contemporary vacation rental, never losing sight of the selfish, unscrupulous, and inescapable aspects of human behaviour. This is a collection that will keep you turning pages, but that will also make you wonder: Are the pages turning you?"--Allegra Hyde, author of The Last Catastrophe
"A life can be said to be structured according to the compiled trade-offs one makes--some subtle and unconscious, others person-defining, life-altering. The heart of each propulsive and mystique-drenched novella in Dead Writers is a study of one such bargain, and its rippling consequences. These explorations puzzle together a collection at once disparate and in conversation, much like how the fabric that constitutes a person is puzzled together by the delicately threaded bargains one makes in one's own life."--Nour Abi-Nakhoul, author of Supplication