Author Craig Davidson moves past angry-youngman phase
Former Calgarian Craig Davidson leaves angry-young-man phase behind
Author Craig Davidson always has seemed to keep a comfortable distance from Nick Cutter, his colourful alter ego.
Davidson is the literary writer who pens memoirs and short stories and has found great success with the gritty 2013 Giller-shortlisted novel Cataract City. Nick Cutter is the macabrely imaginative horror novelist who once wrote a book about bioengineered tapeworms that devour boy scouts from within.
Still, at first blush, it may seem Davidson was collaborating with his inner Cutter for his latest novel, The Saturday Night Ghost Club. The coming-of-age elements and Cataract City setting (a.k.a. Niagara Falls, close to where Davidson spent his early childhood before moving to Calgary) seem to fit nicely into the Davidson camp of concerns. The ghosts, disturbing urban myths and children-in-peril angle, on the other hand, seem to lean more toward Cutter’s dark vision.
“Some halcyon day I’ll find a perfect midpoint between Craig Davidson and Nick Cutter,” says Davidson, who now lives in Toronto with his wife and six-yearold son. “With The Saturday Night Ghost Club, if a real Nick Cutter fan were to read it I think they would come away saying: ‘This is pretty weak sauce.’ There’s no dismemberments. There’s none of the hallmarks of a Cutter book in terms of the excesses.”
In fact, despite the creepy cover art and title, it doesn’t take long into The Saturday Night Ghost Club to realize it’s not really a horror novel at all. While Cataract City certainly contained coming-of-age elements, Ghost Club is Davidson’s purest take on the form. Taking place over one summer in the late 1980s, most of it is told through the eyes of 12-year-old Jake Breaker, a chubby, skittish and unpopular boy who has a close relationship with his cheerfully eccentric Uncle Calvin. Calvin is a conspiracy-minded horror and occult aficionado who introduces Jake and two newcomers to the neighbourhood, Dene brother-and-sister duo Billy and Dove Yellowbird, to the wild and gruesome urban myths of Cataract City. They hastily form the Saturday Night Ghost Club and travel to supposedly haunted spots of the city to reluctantly test the veracity of Uncle Calvin’s strange stories of madness, bad luck and murder.
Still, in the end, the supernatural and horror elements are generally ambiguous if not outright metaphorical, overshadowed by gentler coming-of-age hallmarks. There are bullies, a first love, themes of loyalty and friendship and daring late-night adventures by bicycle. At one point, Billy and Dove even clothespin hockey cards to the spokes of their bikes. But there is also a darkness lurking beneath. Eventually, Jake learns that his uncle’s seemingly benign eccentricities may cover a deeper pain and spring from a long-buried trauma that he has been unable to process.
Interestingly, The Saturday Night Ghost Club actually began life as Davidson’s thesis for his PhD in creative writing at the University of Birmingham, which he received in 2017. He was required to write not only a novel but a critical framework for it; a 40,000-word academic exploration of the deeper themes and theories that drive the novel.
Influenced by American author Tim O’Brien’s flashback-heavy 1994 novel In the Lake of the Woods, and by Canuck classics such as Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel and Anne-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, Davidson had long been fascinated with looking at how memory does or doesn’t work within a traumatized brain.
That became a key element in the Ghost Club, with Davidson eventually making the adult Jake a brain surgeon to add some scientific grounding to his story.
“It does deal very firmly with memory,” says Davidson, who will be appearing at the Memorial Public Library for a WordFest event on Sept. 11. “So I started looking into theories about memory and reading a lot of books by neurologists, by neuro analysts, by psychologists. That’s what my critical theory became, the process of memory. In the first version of the book, Jake was just a dude. He was just a guy looking back at this summer who came to his own understanding of his uncle, both through his own sense of things and what his parents told him. But in the reedit, I thought it would be better if he knew more about the brain. So he ( became) a brain surgeon.”
Still, despite the occasionally graphic descriptions of brain matter, the ghost stories and the exploration of pain and trauma, The Saturday Night Ghost Club often has a surprisingly gentle tone. Davidson calls it his “PG-13” story and, while it’s not really autobiographical, he says its young protagonist is not all that different from how he was as a preteen.
“I’m not sure what I ever want to do with a given book,” he says.
“I just want to sit down and explore my own Id and my own history and my own concerns. I pay homage to Stephen King and Judy Blume and the people I grew up reading and was really influenced by, especially at the age Jake is in the book. I think it’s a panoply of all those things together. Often that’s the way it is with me with a book. There’s not a discreetly focused intention that I’m trying to achieve. There are several different prongs to it.”
The Saturday Night Ghost Club follows his poignant 2016 memoir Precious Cargo: My Year Driving The Kids on School Bus 3077, which recalls his time as a bus driver for special needs children in Calgary. It’s been a bit of a surprise evolution for an author who first published hardcore horror novels under the name Patrick Lestewka. As Craig Davidson, he made his mark in the literary world with 2005’s Rust and Bone, an imaginative and hyper-masculine book of short stories that won praise from transgressive-fiction guru Chuck Palahniuk and was turned into an acclaimed 2012 film by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard. He followed it with the 2007’s The Fighter, a book that may be best remembered for the decidedly unwise steroid binge its author undertook to help him get into the mind of his scrappy protagonist.
“My first books were all angryyoung-man, which is a phase of life that a lot of people go through,” Davidson says.
“I hit my mid-30s and I realized I had no real reason to be all that angry. I had a blessed childhood, really. Any anger that I had was based on my sense of where I belonged and how I fit in. It bled out of me after awhile. I think finding a 40-year-old angry man is kind of a sad phenomenon. So I guess I just picked up different enthusiasms of what I talk about.”
“This is the epoch I’m in right now,” he adds with a laugh. “Hopefully my 50s don’t bring on a maudlin angry old man. I don’t know how that will manifest. But I’m enjoying this part of my writing life, this era. It seems the tone of the writing has changed somewhat.”