GARY BOTTING

5046 Seaview,
RR1 S152 C86 Deep Bay/Bowser,
B.C., Canada
V0R 1G0

telephone: (250) 757-9916
fax: (250) 757-9926
email: info@garybotting.com

Gary Botting - Works in Progress

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