The Hellmouths of Bewdley

In The Hellmouths of Bewdley there are always some murdered men and some gay men. A baby man, a sexy man, and a drunk man. An insane doctor. A wonderful doctor. Twenty guys named Jesus. Men who wonder about women and women who don’t care. A lot of dogs: some of them supernatural. More drunk and dead men. A number of cranes, no herons. A real ninja turtle. A jail, a detox, a fire, and a suicide or two. An agoraphobic with crabs, a bunny messiah, women in ages, some children, and drugs and fried chicken. A very small town. Like sixteen medieval B-movies, The Hellmouths of Bewdley is a series of stories hiding in a novel about a small town in Ontario’s cottage country. Tony Burgess’s first book is a halfway house for literary delinquents; electro-shock therapy for a storyteller who is grateful for the looters’ paradise of post-modern distraction. Burgess believes there is a shape that fact and fiction both seek, that narratives occur in defiance of the things they harbour. In The Hellmouths of Bewdley nightmares are our babysitters: they tell bedtime stories to normal, happy children while their parents destroy their lives or pass out, dead to the world, in front of the TV.