Fiction

The Skeleton Dance

By Philip Quinn

The Skeleton Dance takes place on the mean, formerly clean streets of Toronto before the century ticked over into the new millennium. This graphic novel artfully depicts the human casualties and debris piled up around the downtown bank towers.

Wiped out in the rush of the thousand-eyed crowd hurrying to beehive office cubicles, and unhinged by the death of a close friend, musician turned ad copywriter Robert Walker drifts into a hallucinogenic, violent world of drugs, pornography, and murder. His oldest and closest friend, the successful criminal lawyer Klin Abrams, greases his descent by betraying him to the Diamondbacks, a motorcycle gang trying to control the Toronto drug trade.

The story moves relentlessly forward with the quick pacing of a crime novel but the reader occupies a unique place, seeing the events unfold through the eyes of the potential victim.

Time’s dogs are ready to bury Robert Walker’s bones, diamondback rattlers writhe through his dreams, and the 21st century is about to be born.

Praise for Philip Quinn’s previous work:

“Quinn has penned some of this country’s most radical and ravishing prose.”
—Derek McCormack, author of Dark Rides, The Haunted Hillbilly, The Show That Smells

“Too often, self-styled ‘experimental’ writers pay scant attention to the rigour and music of their words: not so with Quinn…. Seldom is a word wasted in this book. Throughout, too, dialogue is sharp with credibility and wit. More unusual, though, is Quinn’s ability to present ideas, dreams, and obsessions not as cerebral abstractions but as corollaries of vivid, hallucinatory action.”
—Melanie Little, The Globe and Mail (on The Double)

ISBN 9781897535042
5.75 x 8 | 168 pp
$18 CAN / $18 US
Rights available:  World