You wake up with a hangover on the sidewalk of Vancouver's gritty Downtown Eastside and you can't remember a thing. The flashbacks are furious: a dead body lies beside you on a bed, a woman lures you into her addict's bedroom, a home is trashed, your movements watched. Someone is out to get you.
Amnesia, a favourite writer's device for making an intriguing story, is put to good use in Gibsons' author Al MacLachlan's first novel, After the Funeral. Paranoia propels the story into high gear.
This noir thriller, published by Ekstasis Editions, follows the dazed journey of Rory in the gritty streets and sordid bars of Vancouver while he gathers up the fragile pieces of his life. Soon, someone recognizes him and tells him he once worked in television. Is that the reason for the horrific memories? Or are they drug induced? Rory can't be sure.
The characterization in this novel is deft: new friends Jenny and Wolf-gang, who help Rory rediscover his lost days, emerge as real - colourful human beings in a black and white world. The street life that he meets on his journey is realistic; they are probably out there right now on Vancouver streets. Only those who spy on him appear as cardboard cut-outs, Boris and Natasha stereotypes, but then, maybe that's because they exist only in Rory's paranoid imagination. Or do they?
MacLachlan succeeds in making the reader wonder right up until the last page, literally.
Al MacLachlan drew heavily on his years of experience as a TV producer with Rogers and BCTV for background to the violent drug scene and the seamier side of Vancouver. As a reporter, he covered many of the wild, pill-popping warehouse parties of the 1980s and 90s, filmed and aired drag shows and interviewed drug users on the streets.
The character of the Hawk, a street person that Rory meets in an abandoned rail yard shed, is drawn from life.
After MacLachlan's years in TV he moved to the Coast, thinking that, as a single parent, it would be a better place to raise his daughter, and he worked for a time on The Reporter, a previous incarnation of this newspaper.
In a launch at the Gibsons library last month, MacLachlan read from the book, along with pal Jim Christy who also launched his new work, The Redemption of Anna Dupree (Ekstasis).
"Christy has been a good, positive influence on my fiction," says MacLachlan.After the Funeral is a quick, thrilling read. MacLachlan has two other such short novels in the works plus a non-fiction, folk history book of western Canada that includes outlaws and police, based on a documentary he once produced for TV.
After the Funeral is available at local bookstores for $21.95.
