Product Description

An imaginative tour de force, Aphid & The Shadow Drinkers is by turns hilarious and horrifying, realistic and visionary. The stories are all on the side of innocence, rebelling against cruelty, idolatry and greed.

This is truly a new voice in Canadian writing: there is something of Kafka, something of Rabelais, something of H.P. Lovecraft at work here.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2375934 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-19
• Released on: 1999-09-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 174 pages

From the Author
Lattey was inspired by a consistent and unrelenting obsession with stories. These stories are attempts at discovery, through language, of the primitive mind, the engine that drives us from beneath. He writes to exorcise demons (or is that exercise?). For levitation (at best). For flagellation (at worst). For the love of language and the absurdity of life.

From the Back Cover
The valley was settled at the turn of the century. First came the English gentry, the Italian stoneworkers, the fruit growers; then came the refugees from Europe. All of them carried secrets from the past: guilts and horrors that coiled beneath their beds like children's nightmares. These are the shadows which stir into life as the modern world, the highways from east and west, cut down through the hills.

An imaginative tour de force, Aphid & the Shadow Drinkers is by turns hilarious and horrifying, realistic and visionary. The stories are all on the side of innocence, rebelling against cruelty, idolatry and greed. This is truly a new voice in Canadian writing: there is something of Kafka, something of Rabelais, something of H.P. Lovecraft at work here.

Steven Lattey's style is as original and mercurial as his imagination, and underlying these stories is a wholly unique, uninsistent mythology: a sense of rebirth from the shadows, of destinies working themselves out across generations and cultures.

About the Author
Steven Lattey was born in Vernon, British Columbia, in 1948. Lattey continues to make his home in the Okanagan Valley, where he grows, manufactures, and markets medicinal herbs.

Lattey studied Creative Writing at Simon Fraser University with Robin Blaser, where he was exposed to and influenced by the West Coast literary community. In 1997, Lattey's Jellyface was selected as the second place winner in an Okanagan University College short story contest, and was subsequently released in chapbook form.