Thompson explores local zombies
Governor’s Book Pub features David Johnson, Norma Jean MacPhee
The media release from Third Person Press describes James F. W. Thompson’s first novel, “Rise of The Mudmen,” as a cross between hit Netflix series, “Stranger Things” and another cult cable series, “The Walking Dead.”
Anyone familiar with Thompson’s body of work as a playwright, actor and director knows he has taste for the macabre.
He initiated the Cape Breton Stage Company’s popular series of Halloween short plays, “Tales from the Bottom of the Well.” As Giles, the evening’s host for the “Bottom of the Well” series, he presided over short plays by Cape Breton writers that served up the grisly and the ghoulish.
He also helped to create an equally popular play series concerning “Black Jack,” the supposed “hero” of a fictional string of barely releasable slasher flicks from the 1970s and 1980s. The final play in that sequence premiered at the Highland Arts Theatre.
His long list of theatrical credits, along with the more outré spooky work, also includes a brooding MacDuff in a Cape Breton University Boardmore Theatre production of “Macbeth,” to directing a light and charming production of “Alice in Wonderland” at the HAT.
Choosing zombies as the antagonists for his first novel seems an obvious choice (along with the fact that Thompson and his wife, Erin Gillis Thompson, at one point performed in a romantic zombie comedy written by Scott Sharplin).
As Thompson says in an interview released by his publishers, “I think it’s just that anything can be a zombie. Anything. And there are so many interpretations of what they can be. Also, for some reason, I’ve always viewed zombies as being the more ‘realistic’ of the monsters. They are just dead people, after all. There are tons of those all over the place.”
“Mudmen” is set in the Cape Breton of the mid-1980s (prime horror movie time) and follows a group of young people as they search for food, shelter, safety, lost parents, among other things amid a gruesome rising tide of zombie creatures. The novel is aimed at a young adult audience.
The novel seems a perfect fit for Northside publishers, Third Person Press.
Over the last decade, Third Person has published numerous anthologies of speculative fiction, as well as novels and short story collections (I’ve been involved in four Third Person projects).
The novel had its official launch at Caper-Con in October, the annual gathering of folk interested in everything from comic books to anime, held this year at Sydney’s Centre 200.
For anyone who missed that launch, Third Person will host an evening with Thompson and his book at the McConnell Library in Sydney on Friday at 7 p.m. It is open to the public and Thompson will do readings, answer questions from the audience and will be available to sign copies of his debut novel. There will also be light refreshments (perhaps the usual zombie canapés — entrails, bloody eyeballs, the usual undead finger food, which, to think of it, may include actual fingers).
The book is available in print and ebook editions in all of the usual local outlets. A copy can also be obtained from Third Person Press online at www.thirdpersonpress.com/.
While we are on the topic of things literary, the November edition of the Governor’s Book Pub returns to the popular eatery on Sydney’s Esplanade on Tuesday, Nov. 21 at 7 p.m.
This month’s readers are two media celebrities — David Johnson, CBU political science professor (and fellow Cape Breton Post columnist) and Norma Jean MacPhee of CBC-Radio.
Johnson will read from his upcoming book, “Battle Royal: Monarchists vs. Republicans and the Crown of Canada,” to be published by Dundurn Press in the new year. MacPhee will read from her soon to be anthologized short story, “Winter.”
The evening will also include the ever-popular “Open Stage” (newcomers welcome), door prize winners drawn from the Jar of Consequence, and a pay-what-you-can admission. See you there.