Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction/Crime/Mystery Speculative Mystery Paperback
When Tom Mellersch, a budding screenwriter, takes a working holiday in “Toontown,” he finds his creative aspirations being batted about by a sleazy producer, his assigned collaborator, an academic director, and his celebrated helpmate. A pair of overbearing actors also hijack the project, eager to have a prequel to their hit, Carlotta’s Reprisal.
Tom soon finds that his scripting attempts are peopled by the city dwellers around him, as much as his dreams, leading him to improve on his fragments, and create an artistic short, an AI space romance, a silent surrealist film, a jewelry heist caper, and even a Movie of the Week.
To shake loose the film industry, Tom flees to the palatial home of a former opera diva, only to fall in with activist malcontents who drag him into one of his own plotlines. Will Tom escape the celluloid city he’s created, and does he want to?
“It is only in the light of memory movie screens that the things people do and say acquire the force of truth. Morse’s sentences turn delightful cartwheels, and create an atmosphere of deviltry. Amusing and poignant.”
– George Toles
“As beguiling as previews watched through a rearview mirror, this cunning tour de force holds you spellbound and breathless.”
– Martine Desjardins
This book was made with the generous support of the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
A metafictional feast in 3 helpings, emphasizing the “double realm” that bridges reality and art, and its power to draw people into it.
