Cheating at the End of the World

by Corey Redekop

Starting high school can be scary, but moving to a new city with your family for a year just before grade nine can make life hell. Throw in a private Mennonite school where the kids have all known each other since birth, a German class that doesn’t make any sense and a creative writing teacher that’s not all that creative and you have a year in the teenaged life of author Corey Redekop.

In Cheating at the End of the World, Redekop shares with readers how he deals with being the new kid at school, and a creative writing class that he hopes will be his salvation that year. Instead it ends up being the class he despises the most.

While he could go with the flow and wait things out, Corey chooses another path, seeking his revenge in the only way that he can: through words.

Partial proceeds go toward Street Kids International.


T - Teen 13 and up: May contain violence, crude humour, suggestive themes and/or strong language.

Strong language - Frequent use of profanity

PDF

First published December 10, 2012

About the author

Corey Redekop's debut novel, Shelf Monkey — winner, Gold Medal for Popular Fiction, 2008 Independent Book Publisher Awards: a Top 40 Essential Canadian Novel of the Decade, CBC Canada Reads — is either a work of insane genius or an intolerable left-wing screed, depending on which review you read. Husk (ECW Press, 2012) was shortlisted for the 2013 ReLit Award and was named a Top Book of 2012 by editors of Amazon.ca. His short stories have found homes in anthologies such as The Exile Book of New Canadian Noir, Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond, Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen, and Those Who Make Us: Creature, Myth and Monster Stories.

Stunningly handsome, supremely talented, superbly gifted at hyperbole, Corey abides in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

"I’ve often wondered how a novel’s characters might assess the book they’ve been thrust, unwillingly, into -­ like victims of a kidnapping. Well, now it’s actually happened to me. Yes, Eric McCormack appears as a character in Shelf Monkey. Once I got over the shock of finding myself there and settled in for the long haul, I thought: What a literate, witty, suspenseful, alternate world Corey Redekop’s created. I’m not so sure I want to be rescued from it!"Eric McCormack, author, The Dutch Wife , on Shelf Monkey

"A playful — yet very serious — ode to bibliophilia. Corey Redekop writes with energy and imagination, deft little jabs that go straight to the solar plexus. I laughed, and thought — a great deal — reading Shelf Monkey."Paul Quarrington, author, Galveston, The Ravine, on Shelf Monkey

"I read several promising first novels in 2007, all so different that I am unable to choose a favorite...Corey Redekop provided this year's gonzo fun with his Shelf Monkey, an utterly enjoyable novel about radical bookworms."Jeff Vandermeer, author, City of Saints and Madmen , on Shelf Monkey

"... stylistically playful ... reminiscent of Stephen King's approach in Carrie. That it feels neither redundant nor artificial is a testament to Redekop's control over his material and his ability to push his story effortlessly forward.What is most praiseworthy about Shelf Monkey is its tone, which is blackly comic, and not afraid to get its hands dirty ... bracing and edgy and skirts the line of cruelty without ever quite tripping over it ... Redekop plays with this tension nicely throughout the novel, providing a critique of a literary culture that prizes shallowness and false sentiment over an authentic engagement with difficult texts, while at the same time assuring all of us who love books that, whatever our literary tastes or predilictions, and for better or for worse, we're all in this together."Steven W. Beattie, That Shakespeherian Rag, on Shelf Monkey