Local spooks

Montreal author P.J. Bracegirdle sets his witty kids’ book Fiendish Deeds in a city that’s a lot like home

by JULIET WATERS

When I was not much older than Joy Wells, the 11-year-old heroine of Montreal author P.J. Bracegirdle’s The Joy of Spooking, I had a friend who lived at 111 Summit Circle. The house was so high up that her family could walk to the Oratory through their backyard.

One night we watched The Omega Man, the ’70s post-apocalyptic zombie classic based on the novel I Am Legend. To get home I had to walk down three endless, creaky flights of wooden stairs, while the wind hissed through the steep, tree-lined slopes. Finally, I hit The Boulevard, where I could catch the 166 West.

That was the longest walk of my life. I still remember the relief of not being pounced on by hooded albino undead, and have always retained the feeling that Montreal’s wealthiest ‘hoods are also its creepiest. When I wrote Around Montreal with Kids, I tried to sell my New York publisher on the idea of a children’s tour of unsettling, summit sitting places: The Allen Memorial with it’s CIA experiment past, the neighbouring Cuban Embassy (directly across the street from the Trudeau mansion), the graveyards, The Oratory basilica with its wall of crutches, and Brother Andre’s boxed heart. They didn’t go for it (especially the Cuban Embassy part, which I believe is now a condo anyways.)

Fortunately, Bracegirdle has had more success convincing a U.S. publisher that this really is a horrific place for children. He’s made a few changes, like a different name and a history of mass exodus (only a slight exaggeration of ’80s post referendum predictions and/or the current North American housing crisis). But just tell me if this description doesn’t sound familiar:

“Spooking. The terrible town on a hideous hill….A crooked road leads to it from a black buzzing bog, climbing up in sharp, zigzagging turns over dizzying drops…to the summit, where endless headstones appear, vanishing into the distant gloom…Beyond this ancient cemetery, the cracked avenues of Spooking begin. Dark and oppressive, lined with huge overhanging maples and oaks. In their shadow crumbling residences loom.... Drafty old mansions, standing impossibly against the onslaught of time.”

Okay, vaguely familiar, but it could happen.

Pretty much everyone in Spooking has moved, preferring the convenience and homogeneity of the flat town of Darlington, a self-described City of the Future. But creepy, in Joy’s opinion, is infinitely better than soulless. Joy hates Darlington, especially its elementary school where she is bussed every morning.

She hates its relentless positivity, its teachers who praise every accomplishment no matter how minimal, and their pandering desperation to befriend the students and impress them with their knowledge of vacuous tie-in trade paperbacks like “Ultradroids.” Joy prefers the Complete Works of E.A Peugeot, which she recently inherited from a dead neighbour who bequeathed it to “a spirited young Spooking lady with a taste for mystery, a thirst for adventure, and an eye for the inscrutable.”

Book One: Fiendish Deeds, the first volume of an intended trilogy, is as much social satire as horror. Take away Joy’s pet bullfrog, and her fearlessness (Joy would relish a night time stroll down zombie-surrounded stairs), and I see a lot of the book critic as a young girl. With her milegligent, self-absorbed yuppie parents—dad is a corporate lawyer, mom a professor of existentialism—I have a feeling a lot of young girls in and beyond Montreal will see themselves as well.

The book business has been buzzing like vultures over the fact that 9–12 year olds is the only demographic where reading is on the increase. Bracegirdle (his real name) is a witty, intelligent voice that reads like a not so bloodless Lemony Snicket. It’s not a far stretch to imagine that he may one day have enough money to restore a drafty neighbourhood mansion of his own.

THE JOY OF SPOOKING:
BOOK ONE—FIENDISH DEEDS BY P.J.
BRACEGIRDLE, SIMON & SCHUSTER
HC, 218 PP, $16.95