Set in the near future in the mountainous and fielded cusp between BC and Alberta, The Plotline Bomber of Innisfree by Josh Massey is the story of Jeffery Inkster, an ex-hipster-turned elk farmer. Inkster, whose goal is to live peacefully with his elk, harvesting their antlers, becomes embroiled in the political violence of oil-pipeline expansion.
Drawing from his experience working in the Peace Country of northern BC, Massey brings us the story of a community of artists and eccentrics who all become suspects in a series of pipeline bombings. But, amid the activism and counter-terrorism, there are other, more mysterious forces at play, forces that eat into the consciousness of all those involved.
Terrifying, hilarious, and suspenseful, this novel offers a satirical perspective of industrial society that will at once unsettle readers and present them with a cathartic release from the exasperation they might feel living in a civilization teetering towards environmental collapse.
Fans of metafiction, especially those who enjoy works with a thriller edge, and admirers of the works of writers Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges and filmmakers Christopher Nolan, David Cronenberg, and David Lynch, will appreciate this post-modern take on contemporary industrial and environmental politics through storytelling.
Praise for The Plotline Bomber of Innisfree: Using prose poems, news blogs, documents and regular fictionalized text, Massey creates and records a bizarre world of the imagination. Or is it imaginary? Perhaps it’s our future. Through the voices of a variety of eccentric characters, Massey makes a convincing case in this short, complex, entrancing novel that is part futurist fiction and part ecological manifesto. –Mark Frutkin, author of Fabrizio’s Return, winner of the Trillium Book Award
Like a kingbird perched on a northern pipeline hand wheel, Massey catches his stories from a source far removed from the espresso bars of the Information Age. He understands both these worlds, and as a satirist he unifies them, has us thinking not of others but as one. –Michael Turner, author of 8 X 10 and Hard Core Logo
A brilliantly witty and incisive tale of our possible ecological near-future, rich in wordplay, exhilarating riffs, allusions and metafictional hijinks, yet filled with an understanding of humans and their complicities, allegiances, desires, and visions, this book … is a subtly compelling eco-thriller about the complexities and negotiations of living in a world balanced between capitalism and the environment. To paraphrase a line from the book, this novel reads like Thomas King, Anne Carson, and David Suzuki on brown acid. –Gary Barwin, author of I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457
