This Magazine March/April 2005
If you think Ralph Klein is the only monster in Alberta, you’re wrong. In Suzette Mayr’s genre-blurring novel Venous Hum (Arsenal Pulp Press), vampire cannibals on a strict vegetarian diet eschew CanLit’s idyllic prairie grass vista for an otherwise mundane suburban neighbourhood. “The suburbs have incredible fictional potential,” Mayr says, because they’re a homogenous environment built for people who don’t necessarily conform.
It’s a theme Mayr understands well, having come of age during the Trudeau era. It was a time of burgeoning multiculturalism and the growing acceptance of same-sex relationships—key issues for a lesbian and person of colour (Mayr’s mother is from the Bahamas, and her father from Germany). A creative writing professor at the University of Calgary, Mayr bemoans the current state of political affairs in her province, but mention Trudeau and her political cynicism evaporates.
She describes the former prime minister as a “superstar” whose fashionable sensibilities transformed the country. “He was a social force in Canada and the world,” Mayr says. “His ideas and policies are what have helped differentiate us from the United States.”
Mayr spent six years writing Venous Hum, taking time to read biographies of both Pierre and Margaret Trudeau as part of her research. As in life, Trudeau is a parliamentarian Apollo in her book, establishing a myriad of rights the characters must learn to negotiate, including same-sex marriage and multiculturalism.
Bored of lesbian coming-of-age novels that are as turgid as afterschool specials, and tired of predictable stories about people of colour meeting tragic ends, Mayr wrote Venous Hum as an antidote to the “deadly serious” style of these texts. Mayr blends humour with horror and shifts CanLit conventions with satire—weaving a Trudeau-era surprise into the contemporary narrative. “I’ve always been interested in the political possibilities of magical realism,” Mayr says.
She believes horror provides insight into what a culture is afraid of, and it just seemed natural to turn the novel’s immigrant characters into vampires. “Ultimately the big fear of immigrants is that they will take away your jobs, and if they do that, you can’t eat and ultimately you die,” Mayr explains. “The fear of immigrants is the fear of them killing you.”
By setting the book in Alberta, Mayr calf-ropes the cowpoke clichés of rednecks and rodeos often associated with the prairies. Although she initially wondered whether the rest of Canada would care about the characters she places in what she describes as a Calgary/Edmonton hybrid, she’s convinced Alberta makes a stronger political impact than more predictably liberal Ontario or Quebec would have. “Alberta has a stereotype of being a bit of a backwater and lacking in cosmopolitanism and sophistication,” Mayr admits. “I wanted to reveal there’s a really strong undercurrent of rebellion here.”
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