MARTIN MYERS by Martin Myers

Up to this point, I’ve written five multi-genre, comically philosophical novels,  The Assignment, Frigate, Izzy Manheim’s Reunion, The Secret Viking and my latest,The NeverMind of Brian Hildebrand.  I also take full blame for The Urban Loft, a renovator-in-the-wry memoir masquerading as a coffee table book.

My fiction has won wide praise in the media and in literary publications in Canada, the U.S and the U.K. The popular press compares my work to the efforts of Mel Brooks, Monty Python and the Marx Brothers, while literary critics rank it with “Kafka, Joyce, Elliot, Barthelme, Nabokov and Borges for scathing inventiveness that makes readers laugh out loud and then in an afterthought of conscience, question their own ethics, morals and reality.” 

When cornered, I claim my fiction is metaphysical mystery and toss around the term, ludic,  borrowed from Argentine writer, Julio Cortazar. Ludic is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “showing spontaneous and undirected playfulness.” Amen.

My many juggled careers include: radio broadcaster, magazine editor, actor, publisher, puppeteer, comic, copywriter, restaurateur, car wash operator, professor and novelist, among others.

I  graduated from the University of Toronto and 18 years later, post graduated from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., where my thesis became my first novel. For a couple of years, I  was a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Toronto and also taught for five years in writing workshops at the U of T and York University, where I learned more than my students. But this may be apocryphal.

If you’re curious about my latest book, here’s a brief summary:

THE NEVERMIND OF BRIAN HILDEBRAND by Martin Myers

THE NEVERMIND OF BRIAN HILDEBRANDis an antic fiction flush with otherworldly flourishes,  a possibly impossible tale told by an improbable protagonist in a coma. Diagnosed as being in a permanent vegetative state, Brian Hildebrand is a so-called “no hope” case, kept on life support at the stubborn insistence of his mother.  

Sounds grim, doesn’t it? But wait.                                   

This is a comic novel. Brian is not the vegetable he is said to be. Unbeknownst to his caregivers, he is fully conscious, fully cognitive, fully aware and inexplicably, smarter than ever. Locked in by unhappy circumstance, a prisoner in his own frenetic brain but rendered a polymath by the rearranged furniture of his mind, he has morphed into a multi-dimensional thinker and is somehow, able to tell his off-the-wall story as it veers tale-twistingly and mind-bendingly from the haunting to the hilarious, abetted by a far-out cast of characters, possibly of Brian’s own creation, possibly not. 

In his head, he consorts with angels, consults with ghosts, dances with demons and shares with the reader the clamor and chaos of the many worlds simultaneously spinning about in his battered but upgraded brain. How Brian is able to do all this is the overriding riddle of Brian’s saga that in the end is resolved, perhaps, magically. Or maybe, it’s all in his mangled but magical mind. Still…

In retrospective analysis, THE NEVERMIND OF BRIAN HILDEBRAND may be a detective story with a twist. There‘s no detective in the book. The reader is the detective and must solve the mystery the book poses from clues that are sprinkled throughout its pages. But just as the reader is about to do so, there is another twist…