About this item
Highlights
- Listless, bored, alienated, and mistrustful, Trace Patterson has finished his first year of university and is living with a drunken aunt in North Van.
- About the Author: Shawn Curtis Stibbards is a school teacher who lives in North Vancouver with his wife and three children.
- 256 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
About the Book
Raymond Carver meets Bret Easton Ellis in this fast-paced novel about vicarious pleasure, people-watching, and social disconnection.
Book Synopsis
Listless, bored, alienated, and mistrustful, Trace Patterson has finished his first year of university and is living with a drunken aunt in North Van. He divides his nights between slasher films and high school house parties. When two old buddies resurface, however--one in a psych ward, and the other on a paranoia bender--Trace's careless-if-not-carefree existence becomes paralyzed by self-doubt. Does he actually want to help his friends, or is he secretly hoping they'll go over the edge? With its cast of brutally shallow characters, The Video Watcher is an American Psycho for the age of social disaffection.
Shawn Curtis Stibbards lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia. This is his first novel.
Review Quotes
Praise for The Video Watcher
"Raymond Carver meets Brett Easton Ellis in nineties North Vancouver. The Video Watcher, with unnerving precision, shows us a West Coast seldom--if ever--experienced in Canadian fiction."
--Zsuzsi Gartner, Giller-shortlisted author of Better Living Through Plastic Explosives
"There's a sweet, lonely menace to Shawn Stibbards' world that is instantly familiar and very, very strange. You get the feeling that at any moment Trace, the video watcher of the title, will be revealed as an angel or a serial killer: watching late night horror movies, listening to metal, and drinking by the pool while he waits for his friend to get out of hospital, a girl to call about a party, sleep to come, summer to end. Utterly compelling." --Annabel Lyon, author The Sweet Girl
Praise for The Video Watcher
"Raymond Carver meets Brett Easton Ellis in nineties North Vancouver. The Video Watcher, with unnerving precision, shows us a West Coast seldom--if ever--experienced in Canadian fiction."
--Zsuzsi Gartner, Giller-shortlisted author of Better Living Through Plastic Explosives
"There's a sweet, lonely menace to Shawn Stibbards' world that is instantly familiar and very, very strange. You get the feeling that at any moment Trace, the video watcher of the title, will be revealed as an angel or a serial killer: watching late night horror movies, listening to metal, and drinking by the pool while he waits for his friend to get out of hospital, a girl to call about a party, sleep to come, summer to end. Utterly compelling." --Annabel Lyon, author The Sweet Girl
About the Author
Shawn Curtis Stibbards is a school teacher who lives in North Vancouver with his wife and three children.
