Fiction. Gay and Lesbian Studies. Will Aitken, the editor of this collection of fictions, said in his recommendation for Dube's last novel, Hovering World, that it is "queer in all the best senses of the word--non-conformist, eccentric, dissenting, crazed, aberrant, and, of course, invaluable." What was true of that debut, is more so of Dube's second major work. Again, the reader finds himself in a Big City world of late night neon, narrow streets, lurid bohemian warrens. Roaming and dwelling herein are strange, almost gothic characters with memorable fixations and obsessions. Thom, the protagonist, muses over the artist Terrence who torches his life's work, over Adrian who seals himself in his flat and persuasively writes his friends that he is presently off hunting Vampires in Eastern Europe, and Zack who braves homophobic thugs in the littered, dawn streets in order to slip provocative supplements into the daily newspaper. In a sense, this collection is about individuals whose zany imaginations have finally run away with them--somewhat like the bus Thom takes at the end of the book and whose driver announces he's hijacking the vehicle and driving from the city. On another level, all these characters with their obsessions are the embodiments of Greek mythic archetypes.

Author City: Montreal CAN

Peter Dubé is the author of the chapbook Vortex Faction Manifesto (Vortex Editions, 2001), the novel Hovering World (DC Books 2002) and At the Bottom of the Sky, a collection of linked short fiction (DC Books, 2007). He is also the editor of the anthology Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism (Rebel Satori, 2008). In addition to writing fiction, he is a widely published cultural critic with essays on books and the visual arts appearing in journals such as CV Photo, ESSE and Spirale, and in exhibition publications for various galleries, among them SKOL, Mercer Union and the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery of Concordia University. Peter lives and works in Montreal.

Reviews and Other Links
http://matrixmagazine.org/reviews/2008/02/at-the-bottom-of-the-sky-by-peter-dube/