Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus

In tribute to the surrealist narrative techniques of André Breton and Robert Desnos, Minor Episodes documents the serial adventures of Minor, the ubiquitous “everymogul” who embodies the economic 1% and keeps musically erotic quixotics on tap. Having entered a “rent in time” that gives each chapter an alternate reality, Minor swaggers through an undersea casino, in-flight blockbuster, bawdy Western, and Kafkaesque job hunt, cavorting with billboard queen Bébé Lala and country-music legend Faith Faith, when not dressing down his shifty sidekick, The Concierge, or haunting the intensely disinterested songstress Miss Sharp. However, danger looms in the form of The Stropper, a serial killer fresh out of a shaving promotion, and an enigmatic ginger-beer icon who has retired from a satisfying life of culinary assassinations.

Major Ruckus, contrapuntal text and parody of the speculative fiction genre, celebrates the stylistic techniques of William S. Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson, following a frenzied struggle by various parties to obtain an essential time-travel component, a struggle that includes psychic “dicks,” universal call-centre operators, aboriginal eroticists, lubricant heiresses, rogue advertisement animations, pornography censors, and alien sperm-bank clones, all to the horrified fascination of hapless meta-writer Oober Mann. But ultimately, it is Carl Sagan who creates the most confusion, when his prudish doodle of a woman is sent into space via the Voyager probe, triggering a plan to “assist” the earth’s declining population through extraterrestrials in the guise of census takers.

Minor Episodes and Major Ruckus introduce The Chaos! Quincunx series.

AUTHOR

Garry Thomas Morse

GARRY THOMAS MORSE has published several collections of poetry, notably Discovery Passages, about the history of his Kwakwaka’wakw Indigenous ancestors, shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award, and Prairie Harbour, also shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award. His novels have gained critical attention for pushing the aesthetic envelope. He is the author of a speculative fiction series called The Chaos! Quincunx, and two of its three books have been nominated for the ReLit Award.

Morse is the recipient of the 2008 City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Artist. He has also served as the 2018 Jack McClelland Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto, and the 2019 Carol Shields Writer-in-Residence at the University of Winnipeg.

Reviews

“Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus is a wonder. Garry Thomas Morse most certainly has Salvador Dalí, Miguel de Cervantes, André Breton, and that rude rocker Gargantua, courtesy of Rabelais, in his corner. His novel, with its themes of sex, money, and intrigue, and with its over-current of hilarity running amok, explodes from the page. To say this novel is on steroids is to downplay things. A careening, giddy ride is ahead, a mad word-dash to realities you’ve never even dreamed of. Transportation guaranteed!”
– M.A.C. Farrant, author, creator of My Turquoise Years

“Like a beguiling house of mirrors, Minor Episodes bends, twists, fractures and deforms reality through phantasmagoric visions, orgiastic inventions and a mischievous use of language. Don’t be deceived by its title: there is nothing minor about this major accomplishment.”
– Martine Desjardins, author of Maleficium

“A careening, giddy ride is ahead, a mad word-dash to realities you’ve never even dreamed of. Transportation guaranteed!”
– M.A.C. Farrant, author, creator of My Turquoise Years

“Here are Bébé Cadum with his enormous smiling visage and Corsair Sanglot in their returning personages Bébé Lala and Signor Minor cavorting over the baroquely surrealist pages of these major Minor Episodes … our beloved Robert Desnos would have chortled in delight: so do we.”
– Mary Ann Caws, author of The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter

“The real reaction would be screaming catatonia, and too many authors would go too far into the alternative and just effuse us to death Pynchonian; but here the characters are true denizens of their milieu, something rarer in fiction than it might initially appear, and give us the reactions of, like, really arch action heroes. Oh! It’s camp! And Minor is an antivillain for our times who puts the Baudribbles and drabbles in DeLillo’s Cosmopolis to shame.”
– Martin McCarvill (LibraryThing)

“Don’t be deceived by its title: there is nothing minor about this major accomplishment.”
– Martine Desjardins, author of Maleficium