A new book from Gibsons author PJ Reece has cracked the case of a real-life Sunshine Coast mystery: who’s behind the Coast Confidential tabloids that began appearing at local cafés and newsstands in the summer of 2023?
Reece released Coast Confidential: Trouble in Paradise at an outdoor reception on Oct. 11 in Lower Gibsons. On its first page, the novel names the fictional editor of the small-town newspaper: Jaxen Dewilde, a crusading teenaged journalist. Capsule reproductions of Dewilde’s editions are scattered throughout the volume, its lurid headlines inexorably linked to familiar Coast locales: “Roberts Creek Goes Gaga as Mandala Blessed by Dalai Lama,” “Rites Go Wrong on Keats Campout,” “The Maid Service is Killing Me, Says Bonniebrook Grandpa.”
Reece’s guerilla marketing campaign — and the book itself — echo a childhood fascination with newspapers. At the age of 10, he and his brother printed and distributed a broadsheet called The District Diary for their Edmonton neighbours. The first issue reported that somebody had broken the light bulb at the local skate shack.
“I’ve always had this idea of kids mooching through the community and telling what it’s really like,” said Reece. “A lot of my early writing and fiction was about kids. I have two young adult novels, but there’s this whole thing I like about kids digging into the scuzzy underbelly of their town.”
Reece, like his fiction, is a shapeshifter whose plots mushroom from everyday plausibility into the realm of fantastic and mirthful exaggeration. His real-life background includes work as a cinematographer, hydrometeorologist, and writing instructor.
His previous book, 2018’s Throw Mama From the Boat: And Other Ferry Tales, surveyed the Salish Sea in search of comic potential. In Coast Confidential, he raises the stakes with compound mysteries: Dewilde is on the trail of a missing private investigator (the evocatively named Sam Paradise, with whom he shares an office). Meanwhile, feral anthromorphs are creeping down hillsides to terrorize urban streets. An ostentatious and unscrupulous elected official (“Mayor Sybil Swank”) subverts a municipal election.
The story — with its combination of outrageous scenarios and loaded language — wavers between the genre of young adult fiction and the realization of a new milieu entirely: West Coast legendarium. When posters and copies of his Coast Confidential paper were vandalized, Reece realized he needed to emphasize that its outsize reports may be drenched in verisimilitude, but spring solely from his own imagination.
“I even had to warn [Mayor] Silas White that this was coming out,” Reece said, “and that [its character of] Mayor Swank is totally corrupt. But he read it, and gave me a blurb.” (“This is the rompiest romp through Gibsons since The Beachcombers,” wrote White.)
“I’m sort of a contrarian in this town,” said Reece, “I’m sort of after the truth.” The irreverent author and the book’s scandal-seeking protagonist share the same appetite for dazzling anecdotes. Reece is already amassing real-life absurdities for a sequel. But Dewilde and his peers are no latter-day Hardy Boys: even in their small-town coastal setting, lives are lived at a breakneck pace in the modern world of ChatGPT, computer hackers and overzealous bureaucrats.
“The stories,” added Reece, who plans a series of Coast Confidential novels, “are just coming fast and furiously.”
An indoor reception to launch Coast Confidential will take place at the One Flower, One Leaf Gallery in Gibsons Landing on Friday, Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. The book is for sale at all Sunshine Coast bookshops and online at Amazon.ca.
