With his new novel The Confabulist, Vancouver writer Steven Galloway effortlessly blends history and fiction into a thrilling narrative that is as irresistible as it is subtly complex.
It’s difficult to go wrong when you start with legendary escape artist Harry Houdini. While he does spend some time with Houdini’s career on the stage, Galloway builds The Confabulist around Houdini’s crusade against the bogus spiritualists in vogue in the 1910s and 1920s, debunking their claims of communication with the dead and crippling the elaborate confidence games they developed around seances and visitations.
The story centres, however, around Martin Strauss, who claims, in the introduction to the book, “What no one knows, save for myself and one other person who likely died long ago, is that I didn’t just kill Harry Houdini. I killed him twice.”
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[via iTricks]
