The Many Fentanyl Addicted Wraiths of Sault Sainte Marie

"I took the second pill. Some relief but not what I'd anticipated. I took the third, overdosed, and that was it for me as a corporeal, living, and breathing human being upon this too sad earth." So succumbs thirty-year-old unemployed writer and hopeless romantic Tom Astaire to an overdose in the opening pages of Michael Sauve's newest novel-a bizarrely upbeat romp through the horrors of being phantasmal, OxyContin-addicted, and trapped in the post-industrial blight of small-town Ontario. As nineteenth-century specters like the historian Sir Edward Capp insist on Sault Sainte Marie's glorious past, Tom and his fellow wraiths plot to avenge their border town's full-blown opioid crisis and unwittingly unleash a chain of apocalyptic supernatural events that leads to imminent geological disaster and the calamitous ascendancy of a cretinous neo-Nazi group called the "Titans of Thor." With its surreally deadpan depiction of a society at rock bottom, The Many Fentanyl Addicted Wraiths of Sault Sainte Marie is a startling and exuberant effusion on nostalgia, memory, and the hopes that outlive us.