The Skeleton Dance

''The Skeleton Dance'' takes place on th emean, formerly clean streets of Toronto before the century ticked over into the new millenium. The story follows Robert Walker, a musician, and his fried, Klin Abrams, a criminal lawyer, as external forces threaten and strain their long-term friendship and lead, eventually, to horrific conequences. The writing is graphic and colourful, pulling the reader into the novel''s swirling maelstrom of drugs, sex, motorcycle and drug gangs, and missing women. The narrative moves relentlessly forward with the quick pacing of a crime novel. ''The Skeleton Dance'' will appeal to readers who like their literature raw, and who have spaces reserved on their bookshelves for Hubert Selby Jr., Charles Bukowski, Leonard Cohen''s ''Beautiful Losers'', Kerouac, Bret Easton Willis, and W.S. Burroughs. But what''s most interesting about the novel is its examination of masculinity and sexuality-in particular, Robert''s ambivalence about desire, his convoluted "queerknot", and the suggestive fissures through which he and Klin interact. At its heart, ''The Skeleton Dance'' is a love story, but one from which "beauty''s long gone." - Quill & Quire "Robert Walker, the novel''s protagonist, is a drug-addicted ad writer who always seems to be on the verge of intensified trouble. You could call him down and out, it would be a fair assessment. The reader is close to all the dirty-doings through and through, whether or not one can sympathize with the circumstances depicted in the pages of the book doesn''t really matter, it''s all happening at hyper-speed, death-obsessed narration, with barbed dialogue and characters pitted against one another with the calculating cruelty of a brutal war." -Broken Pencil Magazine