Fatal Light Awareness

This is a beautifully written novel. It’s a road trip with POV one man’s fantasy life while he searches for “weight” in his everyday life. Readers will see themselves mirrored in the protagonist’s most petty and picayune thoughts and acts, perhaps men more than women, most of whom never even guess the depth and breadth of male lust. The weight of desire. We have an antihero who is a revolting man. A stalker and a peeping Tom, he’s also weak, selfish, self-absorbed to the point of near-insanity and describes the unravelling of his tidy married childless life this way: “I’m just trying to parlay lust into a lifestyle”.

AUTHOR

John O’Neill

John O’Neill is the author of the novel Fatal Light Awareness and four poetry collections, Animal Walk, Love in Alaska, The Photographer of Wolves, and Criminal Mountains. He was raised in Scarborough, Ontario, where his parents worked for many years as building superintendents, an aspect of his history explored in The Photographer of Wolves. He was a winner in the Prairie FireLong Poem Contest and Sheldon Currie Fiction Prize, and the recipient of a ‘Maggie’ – a Manitoba Magazine Award – for Best Story for his “The Book About The Bear.” John was a finalist, with his manuscript Goth Girls of Banff (Newest Press 2020), for the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction. He taught high-school English and Dramatic Arts for 29 years, and now lives and writes in the Leslieville neighbourhood of Toronto. He and his artist wife Ann make frequent trips to Canada’s Rocky Mountains, and this landscape continues to be a major influence on his writing.

Reviews

Fatal Light Awareness casts a dangerous glow on its characters and on the city of Toronto. Shot through with dark humour, O’Neill’s novel is full of pain and portent. An assured and daring debut. – Lee Gowan