Fatal Light Awareness

by John O'Neill

Leonard Edison's wife has a dark and frightening premonition - that her husband will die before his next birthday. Leonard, aware of this forecast, responds with the animal instinct of fight-or-flight - he wings away on an affair with a former student, engages in a series of petty crimes, neglects his dying mother, moves in with his strange, disaffected nephew (who is living off the spoils of a lottery win) and even flirts with the shadowy Toronto Goth world. While he soars towards a new life that might slow the advance of fate, Leonard finds that fate keeps changing its many bird-like sometimes, the wings of darkness are hard and audible; sometimes, they are obscured by bright but fatal light.

362 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 15, 2020

About the author

John O'Neill is the Toronto author of four poetry collections and a novel, Fatal Light Awareness. Most recently, his short story collection Goth Girls of Banff was short-listed in the HarperCollins/UBC New Fiction contest, and his short story The Book About The Bear, won a Manitoba Magazine Award for Best Story; another of his stories, What Is Written, won second prize in the Sheldon Currie Fiction Contest and appeared in The Antigonish Review.