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Book-length
Works Completed or in Progress
Gary
Botting, CANABANADAMAN: COLLECTED POEMS OF GARY BOTTING
(Edited with an introduction by T.M. Gagnon. MS complete,
ready for submission to publisher)
Gary
Botting, CAMPBELL'S KIDS
A novel about incest and willful communal amnesia in the foothills
of western Alberta.
Gary
Botting, CRAZY GRAN
A novel about a new "Chrislamic" sect which in the wake of 9/11 worships "Allajah" and applies sharia law to the adventurous protagonist, Amy, when she is found guilty of fornication - and worse.
Gary
Botting, THE LUMINOUS
LEECHES OF PADUCAH
A novel about radioactive pollution in western Kentucky, where
leeches are bred to spread disease.
Gary
Botting, WRONGFUL CONVICTION IN CANADIAN LAW
contracted with Butterworths LexisNexis, for release in 2006-7
Gary
Botting, X-TRADITION
A socio-political history of the law and politics of extradition in Canada
Synopses
of books presented for publication:
CANABANADAMAN: COLLECTED POEMS OF GARY BOTTING
This collection of poems from 1965 to 2006, almost all of them previously published, is edited with an introduction by Gary Botting's daughter, Tihemme Gagnon of the Vancouver Film School. The poems are presented in chronological order of initial publication date.
Length:
32,500 words (202 pages)
CAMPBELL'S KIDS
A
young woman dressed as a nun is rescued from a forest fire
in the west country of Alberta and taken to hospital at Rocky
Mountain House suffering from serious burns and amnesia. In
a bid to discover who she is, psychiatrist Dr. Peter Lenski
and RCMP constable Raymond Munsat try to jog her memory with
an unlikely possibility: that she is Emily Thompson, one of
eight victims of two suspicious house fires at Camas Lake
that had occurred five years earlier. One of the dead was
a famous artist, Phil Campbell. The protagonist/narrator eagerly
adopts the new identity, whereupon Dr. Lenski shows her photographs
of the fires and eventually news clippings that indicate not
only that Emily Thompson died in the twin blazes, along with
most of her family, but that her younger sister, Margo Thompson,
and her cousin, Tom Campbell, son of the famous artist, had
been convicted of manslaughter in the arson deaths.
Emily
thereupon attempts to deny her new identity. This suits the
purposes of the RCMP brass and the provincial pathologist,
since they have closed their files on the Camas Lake massacre.
Bereft of an identity, "Emily" checks herself into
Alberta Hospital at Ponoka for a 30-day assessment as "Jane
Doe." She soon gets lost in the system, but keeps remembering
more and more details about Emily Thompson, drawn partly from
what she had read in the news clippings. Eventually she contacts
Roy Farquhar, the journalist who had written most of the articles
about the fires, and he agrees to interview her. She convinces
him to take her under his wing.
As
their relationship develops, "Emily" seems to remember
more and more of her past, embellishing her narrative with
accounts of rape, incest and murder. Roy becomes totally obsessed
with her story. He makes contact with Margo and Tom, Emily's
putative murderers. Margo accepts Emily as the injured, fractured
person she has become. Her cousin, however, is less accommodating,
and contacts the police. She is "rescued" from possible
incarceration once again by Roy, who convinces the authorities
that they do not really want to open a file that has already
been nicely resolved. While the identification of "Jane
Doe" as Emily Thompson is reaffirmed, thus closing the
file on the runaway patient, the reaffirmation reinforces
all of Emily's fantasies and dream memories.
In
order further to jog Emily's memory, Roy takes her back to
the scene of the crime. Although Emily has created increasingly
bizarre memories of what may have happened drawn from the
newspaper articles and her imagination, when she returns to
Camas Lake she makes contact with her spiritual mentor, who
not only helps her remember what truly happened that summer
five years before, but helps her to understand why. In placing
herself at the centre of a murder mystery, Emily discovers
that the truth is even stranger than the fictions she has
created. Self-condemned, she realizes that she must make a
final supreme sacrifice to her spiritual mentor in order to
find the inner peace she craves. For Roy Farquhar's interest
in the case had from the outset been born not out of journalistic
interest but by the fact that he himself was a brother of
the deceased artist, Phil Campbell. By deduction, Emily discovers
that she has been sleeping for months with her own uncle.
To her, there seems only one way to snuff out the evil of
incest once and for all.
Length:
92,000 words
CRAZY
GRAN: A Novel
Amy Randall and her Chrislamic family leave their Flushing, NY apartment
to visit her uncle, William Stockman, on his Adirondack farm,
where she is informed of the existence of an old hag nicknamed
Crazy Gran who seems to haunt the valley. Her cousins are
terrified of Crazy Gran, but Amy feels only curiosity for
what or who she may be. She and her "kissing cousin"
Ron Stockman soon learn that Crazy Gran has several manifestations,
and that the nearby military weapons range have a top secret
file on her. They also discover that her late father and Ron's
mother, who both died in a single-engine plane crash over
the weapons range, have been linked by the military to "Crazy
Gran." Ron and Amy suspect that the similar but distinctive
Crazy Grans may be their missing parents who for reasons of
their own are "lying low," pretending to be dead
yet compelled to check up on their children.
Amy's
fanatic mother feels guilty that she came on this holiday
instead of going to a religious convention in Ithaca, planned
to warn the initiated members of a doomsday cult about the
advent of Armageddon. But in a strange turn of events, the
conventioners arrive at the farm en masse when they are prevented
from returning home to New York: their city has been devastated
by a nuclear explosion. The USAF and other military authorities
believe the bomb was one of two salvaged from a B-52 crash
some years earlier. In that crash, two bombs were jettisoned
over Lake Champlain; but they have yet to surface. The chief
engineer of the downed B-52 was Amy's father. It seems no
coincidence that the code name for the class of missing bombs
is "Crazy Gran."
Amy
and Ron are punished by the cult for alleged fornication.
But they both know that that is a ruse by Uncle Will to cover
up an even more nefarious evil: fratricide and mass murder.
Amy discovers that Uncle Will attempted to steal one of her
father's inventions, a laser printing press, which Ray Randall
rigged with a thermonuclear device before he was murdered.
When Uncle Will delivered the press to New York, the altimeter
triggered a timer on the device, which exploded hours later.
Will is therefore a suspect in a much more heinous crime than
murder. Amy discovers that a second nuclear device has been
lodged by her uncle in the heart of Mount Magog, well-known
for its deposits of pitchblende, dysprosium and quartz. A
nuclear explosion could start a chain reaction in the radioactive
mountain that would result in a new lake the size of Lake
Champlain.
All
seems lost as Amy is put on trial for her supposed sins: the
murder of her sister, incest with her cousin and father, and
general debauchery - of all of which she is innocent. The
predicted sentence of death by stoning is her uncle's - and
her mother's - way of keeping her silent about much larger
secrets she has uncovered, from the identity of the mass-murderer
to her own personal knowledge, equally traumatic, that God
is dead. Tied to a stake, Amy awaits her sentence, with her
mother at the front of the line hefting rocks of quartz and
pitchblende, preparing to hurl them at her daughter. Amy is
saved from certain destruction only by the intervention of
her cousins - and Crazy Gran. But she must henceforth live
with the knowledge that her father, whom she revered and loved,
is a mass murderer, whose irrepressible will has been exercised
beyond the grave.
Length:
87,000 words
THE
LUMINOUS LEECHES OF PADUCAH
After
being bitten by a strange-looking leech, a supply teacher
at Heath High School near Paducah, Kentucky, goes into a coma.
Lt. Terry Wright, Ph.D., is directed to identify the leech
and determine where it came from. He interviews high school
students, including Jennifer Mitchell, the daughter of his
new girlfriend, Grace, a pharmacist. He suspects that Jennifer
is covering for the person he suspects of bringing the leech
to school, but his attempts to warn her from associating with
the suspect, Jim Benson, only leads her to rebel. She meets
Jim's father, the ailing Dr. Carl Benson, who 16 years before
brought her into the world as her mother's physician. He is
now a squatter on land claimed by the West Kentucky Wildlife
Management Area, and believes the land was wrongly taken from
his family decades before. Since the death of his wife from
exposure to radiation, he has relied on a naturalistic cure
for his own leukemia: leeches.
While
Terry suspects Jim, Jennifer suspects that the luminous leech
is a product of militarily sensitive vector technology. Terry
quickly identifies the leech as an African species, but realizes
that it may have hybridized with local medicinal leeches.
It soon becomes evident that, besides being radioactive from
pollutants originating from the gaseous diffusion plant (called
by locals the Bomb Plant), the leeches in the WMA are vectors
for a variety of more conventional blood-borne diseases, from
rabies to AIDS. Jennifer and Terry Wright independently uncover
a plot by a faction of the U.S. Army to use medicinal leeches
as vectors to spread AIDS in Third World countries in Asia,
Africa and South America: the "Third World" War.
When Terry tries to thwart the plot by killing many of the
leeches with potassium cyanide, he is arrested by the perpetrators
before he can expose them, tried summarily for treason, and
sentenced to be executed by firing squad.
Determined
to exonerate her lover and expose the entire plot, Grace and
her friend, Kitty Devlin, an ambulance driver, with Jim and
Jennifer's help, successfully intercept the first shipment
of contaminated leeches, but in the process put themselves
and their children in the line of fire. Jim and Jennifer barely
escape the conflagration as a helicopter gunship attacks the
ambulance but hits instead the transport carrying the contaminated
leeches. Wading through polluted streams and ponds, Jim and
Jennifer make their way across the WMA to safety and the glaring
lights of publicity. Jim discovers that he is the heir his
father's land - and that the disputed land is indeed rightfully
his.
Length:
121,000 words |
