Days by Moonlight

Alfred Homer's just trying to put his past behind him. He's lost both his parents to a car accident and his lover has just left him. So he joins his parent's friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, on the hunt for information on poet John Skennen that will take them both across Southern Ontario.

And while the small towns of Schomberg, Feversham, New Tecumseth and Coulson's Hill are all actual locations in Ontario, what awaits the pair in the book is another thing altogether. They encounter towns peopled by blacks that speak only in sign language, annual house burning lotteries, ridiculous Indigenous parades, witches, werewolves and the Museum of Canadian Sexuality.

It's all a deep metaphor! It sound exhausting and self-important when I put it like that, but Days by Moonlight proves to be a dreamy odyssey propelled by Alexis' lyrical writing that glides effortlessly from one story to the next. It avoids feeling didactic and self-important in favour of a bucolic, certainly skewed but confidently Canadian road trip. All that's missing is a Timmy's double-double for the ride and roadside poutine stops.