Caesarea

by Tony Burgess

The third and final installment of the trilogy, this novel reveals the what happens in a town that can't get to sleep at night, where everybody's embarrassed but nobody is mentioning the mess. The book asks questions the town doesn't want answered, such as Who's been sleeping in your bed? You're safe when you lock your front door, right? Not in this town, the story reveals.

Genres: Horror, Canada, Fiction

246 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1999

About the author

Tony Burgess is a Canadian novelist and screenwriter. His most notable works include the 1998 novel Pontypool Changes Everything and the screenplay for the film adaptation of that same novel, "Pontypool" (2008).

Burgess’ unique style of writing has been called literary horror fiction and described as ”blended ultra-violent horror and absurdist humour, inflicting nightmarish narratives on the quirky citizens of small-town Ontario: think H. P. Lovecraft meets Stephen Leacock.

Reviews

[Chris Browning · Rating 5 out of 5]

My dad suffered from a particularly unpleasant side effect to his Lewy Body Dementia, something called Capgras Syndrome. It started with the delusion that my mum wasn’t just my mum, but a series of identical Shirleys each of whom fulfilled very different roles: there was the wife Shirley, the mum Shirley, the one who cooked, the one who cleaned, the one who drove and the one he didn’t like who would be bossy. Mum would go to the loo in the night and find him laying in the middle of the bed so up to ten other variations could also lie down. And the weird thing is mum is an identical twin and he had absolutely no problem with my aunt. The doubling ended up extending, in the last years of his illness, to a whole double of their house and our family who lived at the other end of the cul de sac and who he was very frightened of

Obviously, Caesarea is not about Capgras syndrome, but something about the dualities and phantom variations lying here within has the same dizzying effect as hearing from my otherwise pretty lucid dad about all these variations happening around him. I suspect the idea behind the book is to create a very literal variation of that cliche of “the seedy underbelly underneath the otherwise beautiful town”. But to confuse things, just before chaos very literally breaks out, the hidden and inner Caesarea is actually a lot less chaotic than the original one. It’s like fragments sticking to the surface of each reality, so the effect is like a never ending Moebius strip of insanity

The key, as I think is so often the case in the trilogy, is troublesome Dr Mendez. For the first time his death in the very second story in Hellmouths is directly addressed. And Grant Mazzy is also very much alive again in this second town (and confusing things on an even greater level is that both, in very different forms, appear in the film of Pontypool). Burgess is never anything short of fiendishly clever, so I think he’s very clearly dangling a superficially facile reading of the levels of reality in the book to distract us. And in many ways, this is the most easily accessible book in the trilogy. But that’s again all false dangling I think, because Burgess is cleverly drawing us down one particular narrative direction before hurling us into a wholly new one. It’s baffling, troubling and lingers in a very real way in your mind

The whole trilogy feels like an unstable, constantly in flux universe which toys with several easier readings but whose actual meanings are dizzying and unstable and just out of your grasp. I can’t remember feeling an actual NEED to reread a book immediately in the same way as I do this. And I fully understand that it will take several more readings to even begin to fathom the awful design in these frankly extraordinary books

[Sandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tony Burgess is a genius, I'm confident of that, and there are moments of brilliance in this novel just as in everything he writes. Unfortunately this time for me the language was the only compelling thing about the novel, and though it was still a good read simply for the moments of poetry and insight, I was still disappointed by the book as a whole.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tony Burgess is one of my favorite authors. and this book, while not the best in the trilogy, is wonderful in its own right. Simultaneously grotesque and poetic, the reader ever knows what is coming next.

[Shelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I wasn't a fan of his short stories, this novel actually wasn't too bad. I still found there were bits and pieces that didn't really make sense and the second half of the book just threw everything into a loop/upside down and the ending just made me go 'excuse me??'. Outside of that, it was a much more cohesive book to read instead of the jumble that was Bewdley.

[Taksya · Rating 3 out of 5]

In realtà, come tutti i libri che ho letto di Burgess fino ad ora, le cose sono molto più complesse e assurde di così.
Assurde e apparentemente senza senso e senza motivazioni, ma perfettamente logiche nella lucidità della follia del momento.
Non posso definirlo un libro che si lascia leggere, ma se ci si lascia andare allora la storia, mentre ci si è dentro, sembra avere senso.

[Jessrawk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sadly, Burgess seems to think that just talking about a small town is enough to carry a story. It definitely is not, particularly not a novel-length one.