It was a dark and stormy night - yes, literally - when Robert J. Wiersema came up with the idea for his new novel, Bedtime Story. It was one of those terrible rainy Vancouver Island weekends; his wife and son were away visiting family and he stayed behind in Victoria to deal with flooding around the house. He was also reading a Jonathan Carroll novel - he can't remember which one - that dealt with fathers and sons, and he started thinking about how rare that was in fiction.
"There was nothing that really spoke to me in the early 21st century, slightly geeky, postfeminist personal way," Wiersema said recently from Victoria. "And I thought, well, maybe the next book should be about fathers and sons. And the idea came on me immediately."
Bedtime Story is a supernatural thriller/fantasy that tells two parallel stories. In the present, Christopher Knox has just bought his son David what he thinks is the perfect 11th-birthday present: a book by an obscure British author Chris himself loved as a boy. David is disappointed at first - he really wanted Tolkien - but as his dad reads to him nightly, he starts to get very, very into it. The book, To the Four Directions, forms the other half of the novel: a fantasy following the adventures of a boy named Dafyd, plucked away from his single mother, so he can help the Queen find the treasured Sunstone - something she needs to cure her ailing husband.
The two worlds collide in a terrifying way. Let's just say that escaping into a good book takes on a whole new meaning.
Wiersema, 39, lives in a world of books himself. The event co-ordinator at Bolen Books, an independent bookstore, he also reviews books for numerous publications (including The Globe and Mail) and is a voracious reader.
His first novel, Before I Wake, about a three-year-old girl sent into a coma by a hit-and-run driver, was written in a "white heat of fear" in just three months, after his wife told him she was pregnant. "It was all out of the fear of being a new father," he says. "What's the worst thing that can happen?"
Bedtime Story explores another worst-case scenario. Here, a blocked writer is struggling with his second novel and his marriage, when a sudden and inexplicable medical condition descends on his son.
"The idea of being taken away by a book was [central] In a way it's also a love song to the books I loved as a kid," he says, citing a novel, part of an old classroom set, about a kid in Shakespearean England who takes up with a group of players and meets the Bard himself.
"I remember so well reading that book and just living it, like living every moment of it and coming out of it, changed. ... I can remember it was a red cloth-bound book. It was small. I can actually feel it in my hand."
Thanks to Google, Wiersema is pretty sure he's tracked the book down, but he's stopped short of ordering it. "I don't want to risk my memories of it being changed," he says.
Wiersema writes his novels longhand in notebooks with a fountain pen - an unbelievable physical feat, when you consider Bedtime Story. At close to 500 pages, the finished book is about half the length of the first draft. The transcription alone took nine months.
His body bears evidence of his bookishness. There are grooves down his right hand from all that pen-pushing. And down the inside of his left forearm, he's tattooed a line from his favourite book, John Crowley's Little, Big: "The things that make us happy make us wise."
When it comes to critical reception and book sales, Wiersema's expectations are pretty low. As Before I Wake was coming out, he told his publisher they'd printed too many copies. "I couldn't imagine anyone other than my family picking it up," he says. "And I still kind of feel that way. I think that's probably healthy in a slightly demented and insecure kind of way." As it turns out, they needed to reprint. The novel was published, ultimately, in 12 countries.
His novella The World More Full of Weeping was short-listed for the Aurora Award, a Canadian science-fiction and fantasy prize.
But he's not expecting any official Can-Lit recognition for his writing. "There is a particular stereotype of the Canadian novel and it has to do with family and secrets and it's either in southwestern Ontario or on the Prairies. There's probably a hard winter, there's an attic, there's a box of photos and someone goes through World War One," Wiersema says. "I don't write any of those things."
Robert Wiersema will read (with Joy Fielding) as part of the Toronto Public Library's Eh List Author Series on Thursday night at the Toronto Reference Library and at Bolen Books in Victoria on Nov. 16.