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"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."
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.
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.
"Four Canadian writers come together for a volume of novellas based on one prompt: 'a bargain.' The novellas are very different in plot and narrative style but are united by an underlying sense of dread. There's the haunting tale of a woman hired to write the biography of a complicated author after he dies by suicide, a found historical document about the atrocities carried out against First Nations students at a residential school, the story of a vacation that provides anything but the peace and tranquility its title promises, and a jarringly direct examination of the deal-with-the-devil trope. These novellas contain no jump scares; instead, their horror stems from the sense that something unavoidably uneasy weighs on the bargains the characters are offered. Then consider the anthology's title alongside the fact that each of the novella's narrators is a writer themselves, which ratchets the fear up to another level. This deeply unsettling and insidious psychological horror collection evokes feelings that will linger with readers, similar to Ananda Lima's Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil or the work of Samanta Schweblin."-Becky Spratford, Library Journal
"Creativity, genius, a romantic spirit, a poetic sensibility-none of these things are free. At least that is what Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Michael LaPointe, Cassidy McFadzean, and Naben Ruthnum communicate in their stories for the collection Dead Writers. Each writer's skills come through clearly in this set of novellas united by the theme of bargaining. In Ruthnum's story, a woman who works in the publishing industry is tasked with writing the biography of a dead writer whom she hardly knew while he was alive. The narrative provides a fresh angle on the trope of the writer's bargain-in which literary skills c
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."
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.
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.
"Four Canadian writers come together for a volume of novellas based on one prompt: 'a bargain.' The novellas are very different in plot and narrative style but are united by an underlying sense of dread. There's the haunting tale of a woman hired to write the biography of a complicated author after he dies by suicide, a found historical document about the atrocities carried out against First Nations students at a residential school, the story of a vacation that provides anything but the peace and tranquility its title promises, and a jarringly direct examination of the deal-with-the-devil trope. These novellas contain no jump scares; instead, their horror stems from the sense that something unavoidably uneasy weighs on the bargains the characters are offered. Then consider the anthology's title alongside the fact that each of the novella's narrators is a writer themselves, which ratchets the fear up to another level. This deeply unsettling and insidious psychological horror collection evokes feelings that will linger with readers, similar to Ananda Lima's Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil or the work of Samanta Schweblin."-Becky Spratford, Library Journal
"Creativity, genius, a romantic spirit, a poetic sensibility-none of these things are free. At least that is what Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Michael LaPointe, Cassidy McFadzean, and Naben Ruthnum communicate in their stories for the collection Dead Writers. Each writer's skills come through clearly in this set of novellas united by the theme of bargaining. In Ruthnum's story, a woman who works in the publishing industry is tasked with writing the biography of a dead writer whom she hardly knew while he was alive. The narrative provides a fresh angle on the trope of the writer's bargain-in which literary skills c