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Pontypool
Pontypool
Pontypool
Ebook69 pages33 minutes

Pontypool

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this ebook

In the sleepy town of Pontypool, Ontario, no one is safe from an epidemic so devastating it will leave you literally speechless.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 1, 2016
ISBN9781770914445
Pontypool

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Rating: 3.8 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Pontypool Changes Everything is an extremely weird novel. It starts off following Les Reardon, a high school drama teacher, as a zombie virus is spreading through Canada. Beyond this, I really can't tell you much about the plot of the novel. Just when I'm getting comfortable with one set of characters, they die and I wonder what's next. This happens three or four times. I was kind of stunned each time a set of characters I cared were gone.The storytelling is convoluted and hard to follow at times. It's unclear whether the events happening are a fictional story within a story or actual events. It kind of reads as four or five short stories instead of one overarching story. The parts that were fairly linear were great vignettes into this unique world. I enjoyed this book as long as I let the story flow, instead of trying to figure out what was happening all the time.The zombies in this novel are unlike any other I have seen or read about before. The virus manifests first in people as an inability to use language. They end up being very confused cannibals. It's unclear how the virus is transmitted, which was something I was really interested in. There aren't any walking, rotting corpses, but the book is still chock full of zombie violence. It was interesting that in a zombie novel, the most disturbing scene had nothing to do with zombies: Siblings Julie and Jimmy live in a shack together (after their parents are killed) as husband and wife, while killing zombies and unsuspecting people alike for food. They are also children. This is a very strange novel, but it's also undeniably unique. I would be reluctant to recommend this to my friends for fear they would think I was crazy and forever doubt any future recommendations from me. However, this book was a crazy narrative into an insane world. I enjoyed the ride, but I don't know if I would take it again.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    In an afterword to the reissued edition of Pontypool Changes Everything, Burgess says that his novel was a private sketchbook never intended for an audience and it shows. The book begins in something like conventional horror story manner–a contagion is spreading through a small town in rural Ontario, turning ordinary people into carnivorous zombies. This contagion somehow transmits through language itself, so first manifests as aphasia and babbling before the more familiar face-chomping ensues. Though you get the impression it may just be an extended riff on the phrase "language is a virus", the hook is compelling, and there are some effective early scenes told from the point of view of the newly infected as they struggle to find the right word. The central character of this part is a drama teacher who has suffered from paranoid schizophrenia in the past. Pontypool Changes Everything isn't so lame as to suggest the catastrophe all in his head, but does hint intriguingly at what it would be like to see your schizophrenic delusions come true.Unfortunately, hint intriguingly is about all Pontypool Changes Everything does. The vague semblance of a plot in the first half becomes completely disjointed and surreal in the second. There are periodic splashes of zombie gore and mayhem to keep your attention, but it's all so abstract that the genre's other elements–the desperate survivalism and social decay–never get a chance to land. By the time you get to the incestuous brother and sister feral children who themselves subsist on the flesh of cannibal zombies, and the sister has a baby that gnaws through its own umbilical cord and then tears off screaming into the night, it's all become a bit of a slog. At the end the compelling ideas about language are abandoned and the only narrative motion "Pontypool Changes Everything" has is the decay of its own coherence. Charitably, you might say that the book itself has become infected with a language virus, but I don't think this was on purpose. I think it's just a mess.Despite it all, I'd like to read something else by Tony Burgess. Pontypool Changes Everything left me with the impression that he is a good writer. There are compelling images sprinkled amid the general haze. About midway through the book is a segment told in the second person about a homeless drug addict drifting through a hospital in Vancouver that has no apparent connection to the zombies in Ontario, but makes for a good short story on its own. I'm sure most writers have desk drawers full of stuff worse than this. Burgess's only mistake was to let somebody else see it.Fortunately, they made a movie out of this book. 2009's Pontypool is a taut, claustrophobic thriller that–aside from the zombie premise and a couple characters' names–bears absolutely no resemblance to the novel on which it is nominally based. The movie is swift and effective, and keeps the interesting ideas about language front and center. The novel was a rough draft. The film is the finished product.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a story that is difficult to describe in a few paragraphs. It is on one level an account of the spread of an infectious disorder across the area around a small town in Ontario, Canada. It is on another level an attempt, I believe, to give an insight into madness. It works I feel on both levels. As a Zombie Novel if produces several new ideas, chief among them the idea that an infection can be spread by language itself. This is an idea that was approached by Henry Kuttner in his short story "Nothing but Gingerbread Left" and to an extent by Stephen King in his novel “Cell”. However, Mr. Burgess plows enough entirely new ground in this book to be a good country mile from anything derivative. This is not going to be a book for everyone. I suspect that folks seeking a Zombie tale are not going to want to take the effort to get through this one. I also suspect that some folks will be offended by a goodly amount of gore and a bit of slightly warped sexuality. But if you are up for a challenge, I would really recommend this read. Mr. Burgess has made a very close approach to “Finnegans Wake” with Zombies. I thought the story was good fun and give it an easy five for its value both as entertainment and as somewhat of a peek into what paranoid schizophrenia might be like.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Superbly bonkers zombie horror"It gestates in the deep structures prior to language. Or, at least, simultaneous with language. In the very primal structure that organizes us as differentiated, discontinuous copies of each other. The virus probably enters, in fact, among paradigmatic arrangements. And then, almost instantly, the virus appears in a concept of itself. This causes all sorts of havoc."It a delicious premise: a language virus that its 1st symptoms are manic déjà vu and aphasia followed by the revenge of cannibalism. This book is in some respects jaw droppingly brilliant, gob smackingly horrific (yes my mouth was open) and book throwingly frustrating (yes that IS a verb). Burgess doesn't want to concentrate on one story, oh no, and he will dash off into future musings, surrealist asides and whip up the odd chapter of meta fiction in and then kill everyone off (err.. probably) and start again. A bit like this review which I have only started to write 10 times.. But look don't be put off because it’s not too insane, or disjointed it does manage to depict an overarching story of the slowly unfolding apocalypse. Split into two halves, the 1st is more focused, taking its time and setting the scene. Fewer characters, a tighter plot and hair pricking horror moments make this my favourite part of the book though it soon touches on some wacky (and fun) literary experiments. It also contains my favourite character a barely sane anyway, a recovering schizophrenic who has seen all this before and just goes to find his son. Madness Vs Zombies.. Brilliant. The second part zooms out not only with people but also in tone. So shift from sleazy TV host Grant Mazzy, the soon to be zombie teenager (and his guardian angel) and then to red neck survival horror (truly ugh!). This chaos is just part of the fun, frustrating but it allows many ideas and arresting vignettes. Every time I look for a quote I keep rereading the damn thing. From the dying view of a zombie to horrifying last moments of an old couple hiding under the bed this an unforgettable book. "And so, now that I have been asked to write this afterword, I realize it has to be an apology, not for the book, which can't be helped, but for the fact that I was unfaithful to its first virtue: I have asked you to read it, and now, sitting here at the end, I am telling you that it might be a mistake that you did" Ignore the author, what does he know? A must for horror fans and lovers of the strange and experimental. Those who are squeamish or require an a straight plot should steer clear, everyone else it’s going to be a 50/50 chance of love/hate.

Book preview

Pontypool - Tony Burgess

PONTYPOOL

Tony Burgess

Playwrights Canada Press

Toronto

Also by Tony Burgess:

The Hellmouths of Bewdley

Pontypool Changes Everything

Caesarea

Fiction for Lovers: A Small Bouquet of Flesh, Fear, Larvae, and Love

Ravenna Gets

People Live Still In Cashtown Corners

Idaho Winter

The n-Body Problem

CONTENTS

Production History

Characters

Pontypool

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

For Carlyle Edwards and Helen Bonaparte.

Pontypool was directed by Gregory J. Sinclair as a radio drama for CBC Radio in 2009 and starred Stephen McHattie as Grant Mazzy, Lisa Houle as Sydney Briar, Georgina Reilly as Laurel Ann, Rick Roberts as Ken Loney, Hrant Alianak as Dr. Mendez, and Daniel Fathers as Nigel Healing.

The radio drama was adapted for the stage and first produced by Strawdog Theatre Company in Chicago, Illinois, from October 13 to November 4, 2012.

CHARACTERS

Grant Mazzy

Sydney Briar

Laurel Ann Drummond

Ken Loney

Dr. Mendez

Nigel Healing

Black.

We hear a radio tuning in.

GRANT MAZZY:

(on radio) Welcome back, folks, and good morning from the snow-covered church on the street they call Drum. I’ve always been a fan of coincidences and when I spot them I make it a hobby of breaking them down, and I’ll tell ya, when you look really closely at the fabric of our world, at the details that weave things together, some pretty strange material appears in the most common of events.

The radio signal fuzzes slightly and a few flakes of snow fall in the dark.

Take the bizarre case of Mrs. French’s missing cat. You may even have seen the signs she posted all over town. The sad missing posters asking us all if we had seen poor, poor Honey. An all-too-common thing, really, but this case, as it turns out, has a few uncommon twists. Consider the fateful morning Ms. Colette Piscine swerves her car to miss a cat as she goes across a bridge and has to get fished, alive and shivering, out of the drink.

As the radio fuzz continues to come in and out, so the snow appears to fall, seemingly linked. Snow as sound and sight.

This bridge, you may know, is the pride of Caesarea and even has its own fancy name: Pont de Flaque. Now pay attention, folks, ’cause here we go: Colette sounds like culotte—panty in French—and piscine means pool. Pantypool. Flaque also means pool in French. So Colette Piscine—in French, Panty Pool—drives over the Pont De Flaque—the pont de pool, if you will—to avoid hitting Mrs. French’s cat, that has been missing in Pontypool. I mean, it makes my head spin. What does it mean? What does it mean, I hear you ask? Really, it means I have a worn-out French–English dictionary, but it brings an interesting point, and I cite the late great Norman Mailer. God rest the great man. Mailer had an interesting theory he used to explain the strange coincidences in the aftermath of the JFK assassination, which, of course, fuelled conspiracy. In the wake of huge events, after them and before them, physical details spasm for a moment, sort of unlock, and when they come back into focus they suddenly coincide in a weird way. Street names and birthdates and middle names, all kinds of superfluous things

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