Fire Eyes

Fire Eyes began with a voice. This voice—the tone, the cry to be heard—was so pronounced, so clear to me that when I first heard it I thought I was hallucinating.

I'd just spent three years working at the Eric Martin Institute, a psychiatric hospital where I was employed as a teacher for the school-aged patients, mostly teenagers who were the IPs (Identified Patients) in some very dysfunctional families. These kids arrived with a whole range of symptoms: depression, anorexia, aggression, psychosis, sexual abuse, anxiety, obsessive compulsions. They were all outsiders, emerging from childhood and increasingly aware that they didn't fit in with their families (if they had one), schools or neighbourhoods. I learned more about the "human condition" working with them than from any other work I have done.

When I'd had enough—that is, when my own saviour complex was cured—I decided to take a year off to write. I wanted to test the sense I had of what writing a novel could be. Every day I wrote for two or three hours. Sometimes I would copy passages I admired from other authors. But I didn't have a story, or characters, or a setting. I didn't even have a feeling for a book.

At the time I was a volunteer at the Victoria NEED Crisis line. After finishing a sleepless night shift on my own (in which I received no calls), I began walking up Fernwood Road toward home when I heard Billy Deerborn's voice: "The bomb went off a little after one in the morning...."

I heard his voice speaking so clearly—with such force—that I knew I had the first lines of my novel. As Billy emerged in the book I realized he resembled some of the patients I'd met at the psychiatric hospital. One of them had been found as an infant in a brown paper bag on the side of a highway. He was dark and brooding and unpredictable. And he provided the voice for the entire novel.

Jacket Blurb

"A dynamite read. Combines a remarkable literary finesse with the tightly wound mainspring of a psychological thriller. A new writer of the very best." —Andreas Schroeder

Billy Deerborn talks to the voices in his head and the dogs that roam his psyche. When he was a baby, he was found by the side of a road in a brown paper bag. Yesterday he blew up a hydro station.

Fire Eyes is the story in between those two events: the making of modern madness. It is a story of mental illness, of the impotence of social services in the face of the immense dislocations of our time, of the armed forces as unwitting inheritors of those who fall through the cracks, and of the power of love to both destroy and save. It is a story of alienation and survival.

But mostly this is Billy's story. From that roadside ditch we follow him from foster home to institution to the army, along the way witnessing his fractured liaisons with the opposite sex and his attempt to find solidity through friendship. His literally fatal romance with Renee catapults him towards catastrophic events.

Yet in the end Billy survives. He is out there still, as are others like him, waiting for the coalescence of just the right accidents of fate to make their marks on the world.

Reviews

"Fire Eyes is a taut psychological thriller with literary overtones, a very contemporary terrorist romance." —Globe and Mail. Read the full review here.

"To put it simply, there is some very good writing here." —Alberta Report