Dead Writers

In this collaborative omnibus-style fiction project, four writers navigate the protean concept of the “bargain” in novella-length stories. The lives of 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, stand side to side within this macro-narrative of interlocking themes.

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.