Death Becomes Her (from the National Post)

by Mark Medley

Traditional thinking has it that if you want your novel to sell well, one of the last things you should do is encourage the murder --even fictional--of a literary critic. But celebrating the demise of book reviewers is exactly how Stratford, Ont., novelist Terry Griggs has promoted her new novel, Thought You Were Dead. Thus far, the Revenge Lit contest Griggs and her publisher Biblioasis have cooked up -- submit a short story imagining the death of a critic--has received dozens of entries -- including some from notable authors -- and garnered buzz across the book world. But what does it say about the authors lining up for the chance to plot a critic's grisly fate?

"We've all, I suppose, experienced our humiliations in the writing world," Griggs says. "Perhaps bad reviews, or what we feel are unjust reviews. It's a very common experience for writers." She laughs: "I noticed that [in] some of the entries, there's a lot of feeling."

The murder of a "freelance reviewer" kicks off Thought You Were Dead, Griggs' seventh book in a career that has spanned more than 20 years, from short stories to comic novels to children's lit.

"I don't like being classified as this kind of writer or that kind of writer," she says during an recent interview at a downtown Toronto coffee shop. "I like moving in between the genres. And besides, this book itself is a bit of a hybrid."

Indeed, Thought You Were Dead blurs the line between genres; the plot apes well-known tropes of hard-boiled detective paperbacks, at the same time packing in enough absurdist humour to render the book a send-up of the genre. There are even illustrations by Nick Craine, lending the book a slight graphic novel vibe. Still, the writing is literary enough to remind you that Griggs was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for her first book, Quickening, way back in 1990 ("It sort of trails behind me like those cans behind a car at a wedding," she says). And the initial idea for the book was even more bizarre: some kind of fictionalized writer's manual concerning genealogy.

Her own literary genealogy is long and varied. Griggs, 57, has published with small presses (Porcupine's Quill), big presses (Random House) and presses that no longer have a fiction program (Raincoast). In 2002, she won the now-discontinued Marian Engel Award, awarded to a female writer in mid-career for a distinguished body of work.

It took six years of writing -- off and on -- to complete her most recent work. Trouble arose when her editor, Patrick Crean, at Thomas Allen & Son wanted changes made to the manuscript that Griggs wasn't willing to make. She withdrew the novel.

"Something just didn't jive," she says. "I couldn't see any problem with it. So I just sat on it for a while. I thought, 'Hmm, maybe I'm missing something here.' ...It was puzzling."

Dan Wells, publisher of Biblioasis, knew Griggs was working on a novel. He asked to read it, then jumped at the chance to publish it. In hindsight, it was a good business move: The book, in stores for a hardly month, has already gone back for a second printing.

"People talk about writers as word-drunk: Terry's work leaves me feeling physically tipsy and giddy," Wells gushes. "I love everything about her writing: the headlong energy of it, the verbal sparring, the humour, the zaniness of her plotting, the biting social farce and criticism. She's a great artist, but she's also a hell of a lot of fun -- an undervalued concept in literary circles these days: We seem to prefer our literature flavoured with castor oil."

And to think Griggs has achieved this success with a quasi-mystery is even more surprising after she admits she'd never even read a mystery before starting to write Thought You Were Dead. She eventually fell in love with the genre through authors such as Ian Rankin, P. D. James and Martha Grimes, but agrees the mystery novel, like other genres of fiction, gets no respect.

"I think it's unfortunate, especially in Canada, that genre writing is stigmatized -- it's thought of as a lesser form," she says. "I certainly don't look down on any other genre. I'm quite happy to read anything that's well-written. That's what I'm looking for.

"But of course," she adds, "the reward for those books is that they sell really well."

As a full-time writer, Griggs ekes out a living through her craft, though she jokes it doesn't really allow her to make a "decent" living.

"I'm happy to be publishing, and I haven't made any compromises. I write my idiosyncratic books and I get great response from readers. That's very gratifying. It's hard to say. I have lots of things planned and on the go, but who knows? Maybe I'll get a real job."

No Comment: A Revenge-Lit Flash Fiction (#3)

by Shane Neilson

He looked good, chalked up, chalked off. He deserved it. He had been chalking up books for a few years, getting his start at an Open Mic and confirming his love for his own voice. But getting poetry into journals was a harder task than showing up early at readings, and poetry forced him to modulate his voice, and he wanted to hear his own voice. So he began writing reviews, finding that editors loved blood on the page. And he loved the blood of others on the page. He sometimes went back to the Open Mic, but randomly, to increase the terror, and he refused to read poetry, he read reviews, reviews of the books that were being read that night. The Open Mic organizers let him do it, because they were afraid of him, afraid that he would write reviews about them, and he would, and they knew he would, if they refused him. But his voice: he recorded a whole CD of his reviews, titled it Greatest Hits, and reviewed it himself in a local magazine, the only time –ever, it would turn out- he would uncork the word “masterpiece.” It was an odd voice, a wannabe Caper accent forced through a potato peeler, and it was completely out of sync with its own malice. It is this way I imagine him, stabbed in the back, his assailant refusing to identify himself or even preface his attack with the knowledge that he was about to die, blissfully composing his latest takedown on the way back from the Open Mic where the featured reader that evening, I hear, is smiling as he utters his most famous review, “No Comment.”

Writing Lessons: RevengeLit#2

Tune in at revengelit.blogspot.com
to ensure that you don't miss a thing. Revenge stories by Nathaniel Moore, Shane Neilson, Wayne Clifford and others to follow shortly. A really, really good start to this! Thanks to everyone, and keep them coming!

Writing Lessons
by Lydia Ondrusek

Ivor Miskelson was a hated child.

Like a weed that sucks up repeated attacks of pesticide to become, finally, poisonous itself, he dealt with the rejection of his relatives and peers, raised himself from the garden plot, and became the grotesque focus of all eyes, unplanned impediment to the growth of everything around him.

Ivor Miskelson became a literary critic.

Read To Me, Miskelson’s television show, was a trainwreck. Millions tuned in every week to see if its host could, by a series of increasingly ugly jabs, again reduce a bestselling author to tears. He did not disappoint. Until Jonquil Esterhaus.

He questioned her lifestyle, laughed at her hat. She admitted her changing from writing children’s books to cozy mysteries could cripple the educational life of a generation. Her demeanor remained serene. After reading the teaparty scene from “I’m Afraid The Vicar Is Out,” she even kissed Miskelson during the closing music. Credits rolled with them deep in conversation, holding hands.

Police responded to a call from Esterhaus the next morning to find her in her bedroom, marking galleys. The late Mr. Miskelson sprawled fully dressed across her calico bedspread, dried spittle on his chin and an empty cup that looked like it had held cocoa clutched in stiff fingers.

“He said I was fascinating, that he wanted to see what I was working on next,” Esterhaus said to the detectives as people dealt with the body. She patted the galley of “The Coroner’s Cocoa.”

“So I showed him.”

The Case of Poe Ethic Justice: A Revenge-Lit Fiction

Simon Lacerous’ column “The Last Word” routinely excoriated literary works: if realistic, they lacked imagination; if fantastic, they lacked veracity; if existential, they lacked moral compass; if moralistic, they were fascist.

As he left his office one midnight dreary, he was confronted by a hooded figure carrying a stylus, a goose quill, a ballpoint, a laptop, and a scythe.

In a flash, Simon saw the error of his ways and shouted out this devious fiction: “When I woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, I found myself changed into a monstrous vermin. Surely that’s punishment enough?”

The hooded figure opened its cloak, revealing multivariate weaponry. It spoke in sepulchral tones: “If, sir, you were in fact changed into a cricket, I should employ this [it indicated a flyswatter] but I perceive you are a critic, indeed of the most slovenly, ambushing, and puling sort.”

“Perhaps so,” S.L. replied, quickly kneeling, “but I made less money than most writers. Oh, spare me, hooded figure!”

H.F. pursed its lips and extruded a large stick of playground chalk. Its robe swirling, it danced macabrely as it drew—on the alley’s tarmac and around the kneeling critic—the forensic figure of a victim.

“Lie here and don’t go outside the lines,” it ordered.

Simon complied.

H.F. pulled a kalashnikoff from its robe and riddled S.L. with a staccato series of very short bursts, creating umlauts, colons, diereses, ellipses, and, even, periods.

Police, seeing the corpse already with an outline, experienced brain seizures.

A second-story window opened and Annabel Lee, an intern with Marlowe, Poirot & Holmes (also a leggy dame with big headlights and a smart mouth on her) cried out, “Look, yuh lousy flatfeets, it’s obvious you should put out an APB for that punk Chu Aishen!”

THE END

Creating a little Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Terry Griggs pens the Tuesday Globe & Mail essay, offering up her thoughts on Musca Domestica. Read the whole thing here. A taste below...

Anyone familiar with my earlier work might be thinking, A mystery? Genre fiction? This isn't her usual thing. Can we trust her? Does she play by the rules?

You can trust me ... implicitly (pick a card, any card). I not only play by the rules, but I play with them as well, and I play in the wild area out behind the school of orthodoxy. Besides, the distinctions matter less than the execution, and literary categories have been getting softer of late. Transgression is in the air and on the page. Who was it that said there is really only one main plot in all fiction, which is: Nothing is as it seems? Somebody, I forget. But if that isn't a dead fly position, I don't know what is.

Musca domestica. In the soup, in the ointment, on the wall, devil's embodiment, associate of death and decay, bearer of much weighty negative symbolism — no wonder the little guy is pretending to be dead. Who wants to work with the regimental efficiency of an ant anyway, or the tireless industry of a bee? Hey, shake a leg if the mood strikes, snack on a glob of jam, check out that dead body wedged behind the sofa. Flies are often the first detectives at the scene of a crime, after all, and perhaps would be less eager if they knew how forensically useful they are in determining the time of its occurrence.

It's fitting, then, that this compound-eyed sleuth is the first bug one encounters in Thought You Were Dead, a book in which the motives are mostly ulterior, spider-to-the-fly situations abound, and the main character, Chellis Beith, has a severe aversion to housework.

Thought You Were Dead

For those who have not seen it, a slightly extended version of our trailer for Terry Griggs's forthcoming Thought You Were Dead is up now at the Globe and Mail website. There will be more forthcoming on the Globe site in the coming weeks, including the May 12th installment of the Tuesday essay and a Globe Chapter preview. Stay tuned.

Literary Value First

A couple of nice reviews -- Feature Reviews, no less -- by James Grainger in the current Q&Q of two of our Spring titles: Terry Griggs's Thought You Were Dead and Cynthia Flood's The English Stories. Of Dead Grainger writes, in part: Thought You Were Dead can be summarized as a playful deconstruction of the genteel drawing room detective novel, brimming with knowing winks to fans of the genre and the more highbrow reader ... Beith finds himself in the middle of a sinister plot of Chandleresque complexity. / The narrative and dialogue are clever and lively from beginning to end, and many readers will enjoy the layers of comic nuance as Griggs turns the genre inside out. Beith is a fine take on the stock character of the reluctant gentleman detective ..."

Of Flood he writes: "Flood artfully transplants the conventions of the Canadian Gothic story form and its obsession with death, isolation, madness and antural landscape into the satiric, provincial milieu of the genteel British lower-middle-classes enshrined in the works of V.S. Prichett. ... Flood creates a vivid gallery of British types ... (and) these stories ultimately acheive a brooding resonance that captures the literal and spiritual dampness of a provincial scene that all but died out with the last remnants of the British Empire."