Days by Moonlight
Gulliver’s Travels meets The Underground Railroad: a road trip through the countryside – and the psyche – by the author of Fifteen Dogs. Longlisted for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents’ friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, who wants company as he tries to unearth the story of the mysterious poet John Skennen. But this is no ordinary road trip. Alfred and the Professor encounter towns where Black residents speak only in sign language and towns that hold Indigenous Parades; it is a land of house burnings, werewolves, and witches. Complete with Alfred’s drawings of plants both real and implausible, Days by Moonlight is a Dantesque journey taken during the “hour of the wolf,” that time of day when the sun is setting and the traveller can’t tell the difference between dog and wolf. And it asks that perpetual question: how do we know the things we know are real, and what is real anyway? “A mash-up that is part fabulism, part faux biography, and part satire, Days by Moonlight conveys the experience of grief, managing to transform its inarticulable and symbolic weight into a finely wrought literary work.” —Quill and Quire
Series
Featured Series
5 primary booksQuincunx
Quincunx is a 5-book series with 5 primary works first released in 2014 with contributions by André Alexis.
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Alfred Homer's just trying to put his past behind him. He's lost both his parents to a car accident and his lover has just left him. So he joins his parent's friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, on the hunt for information on poet John Skennen that will take them both across Southern Ontario.
And while the small towns of Schomberg, Feversham, New Tecumseth and Coulson's Hill are all actual locations in Ontario, what awaits the pair in the book is another thing altogether. They encounter towns peopled by blacks that speak only in sign language, annual house burning lotteries, ridiculous Indigenous parades, witches, werewolves and the Museum of Canadian Sexuality.
It's all a deep metaphor! It sound exhausting and self-important when I put it like that, but Days by Moonlight proves to be a dreamy odyssey propelled by Alexis' lyrical writing that glides effortlessly from one story to the next. It avoids feeling didactic and self-important in favour of a bucolic, certainly skewed but confidently Canadian road trip. All that's missing is a Timmy's double-double for the ride and roadside poutine stops.
