The other week, I had the pleasure of hosting a book signing with two authors:
- Eleanore Kosydar, local poet and author/photographer of the gorgeous coffee table book celebrating regional beauty, The Dundas Valley: Visions of Beauty.
- Claire Cameron author of The Line Painter. Here's the review of this great novel that I recently posted on the Chapters/Indigo website.
Cameron has done an excellent job of taking a cheesy horror movie premise and offering an intriguing and satisfying twist to it. She sets up two unlikely road trip companions each with their own deeply buried secrets, and teasingly reveals more and more about their "hidden" pasts as the highway slowly unrolls in front of them.
In much the same way that Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness" was a river-boat trip into the depths of internal darkness, Cameron's novel is a road trip that probes those painful-to-reveal elements of darkness we all like to keep hidden from others as well as from ourselves.
Anyone who has ever driven alone on an unlit highway in the middle of night, or tried in vein to run from their past is going to appreciate the brilliant way that this author has married the two concepts so wonderfully in this novel.
I have to admit that the basic premise for Claire's novel originally caught my eye because it was similar to the premise of one of my more popularly received short stories ("Erratic Cycles" - which you can read here for free online). I was quite impressed with Claire's take on the "stuck on the highway in the middle of the night" premise. Because, though she went in a completely different direction than I did, I quite enjoyed the characters and the unraveling mystery she laid out -- and the fact that she kept me on the edge of my seat throughout the tale.
The signing was an enjoyable afternoon, and I thought it was interesting to combine a local interest author title with a fiction title for the event. The ladies hit it off wonderfully and enjoyed each other's company. And customers also seemed to enjoy having more than one author's book to check out.
Claire brought a camera with her and we snapped a few shots of the signing. (I, of course, couldn't resist getting into the one of the photos, being a big ham and all)
Mark Leslie & Claire Cameron
Eleanore Kosydar & Claire Cameron
1 comment:
Am I the only idiot who is going to state the obvious? Well Claire is a book club hottie!
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