Cannibals clamoring in hordes throughout Ontario, snapping necks with confused slackened jaws, repeating short strings of language that drip off their rotting lips as slowly as the congealed blood of their victims. A crazed man in a car with a crying child, a stroke victim, a news broadcaster, a community, a province entirely helpless as the bizarre zombie-manufacturing AMPS virus - Acquired Metastructural Pediculosis - infects the signifiers of its victims and spreads through comprehension of the signified, wedging itself snugly into that neat pre-lingual gap. Catastrophe. Apocalypse. Language zombies. A semiotic virus. What on Earth could be more allegorical?

Here I must throw a self-reflexive wrench in this digi-review machine, because this is - markedly - not allegorical, but instead admittedly autobiographical, or so the author's description explains. Pontypool Changes Everything, the second novel from the mind of Toronto writer Tony Burgess, is a scathing psychological apocalypse, dipping in and out of both social parody and grotesque nihilistic zombie shock-treatment that leaves the reader reeling with a glut of contrasting impressions. Creating an Ontario plagued by terror and infected language, Burgess creates complex levels of commentary, both within the narrative and around the narrative, gesturing as much to allegory as to metafiction. Using words to explore the failure of words, Burgess creates a narrative that figuratively nullifies itself; a bizarre, cyclical, simply unresolvable world of infected inter-subjective relation in the symbolic register of experience paradoxically unfolds within the very realm it marks as contaminated. Toss in the palpable horror of physical degeneration, murder, suicide and cannibalism, and you have a palatable piece of  90's pomo candy, using metafiction without the weight of realism to create a dis/connective critique that just shits all over any previous concept of the Canadian manifestation of the pomo symptom. Man, it's refreshing.

Published in 1998 by ECW Press, Pontypool Changes Everything is a book that both affirms a plagued Canadian community, and casts doubt on the structure of reality upon which the gruesome events are based. Creating characters intrinsically distanced from the full cathartic depth of sympathy, Burgess weaves juxtaposing temporalities and levels of reality on a trajectory that backs up over its own logic to pursue bizarre lines of flight across the Ontario countryside. It's unique blending of an anti-realistic figurative plot and its awareness of its use of a diseased medium make it a truly bizarre novel that defies any categorization - from my end - aside from pomo, and perhaps autobiography, if the first half of the novel can speak for itself.

The first 144 pages of the novel are under the heading "Part One: Autobiography," during which the plot follows the exploits of one Les Reardon (a post-breakdown drama teacher who has been separated from his wife) from the start of the virus - which is often alluded to have something to do with the man - to his death and autopsy by a local doctor among a pile of bodies in the local high-school gymnasium. In the face of the illogical events and botched, often paradoxical reality portrayed, the reader is often and openly spurred to ask the question: Does this horrifying narrative bear on reality, or the imagination of a diseased deadbeat bent on destroying reality? Close to the end of the section, Chapter 28 titled Hungry Like The Wolf taunts the reader's lust for the solution to the question, self-reflexively musing:

What is an autobiography? What can fairly be said to lie within its bounds, share in its purpose? [...] Are these little autobiographemes inserted into imagined lives? Probably. But still, that's not autobiography. Not really. Is this an autobiography? Yes. (116)

Now I know, this is exactly where I have to put on my faux fur critic's coat and dip right into my supposedly elucidating interpretation of this quote, but in terms of this novel, this passage blows apart any possibility of certainty, breaks apart any notion of creating ground, either in reality or imagination, for this narrative. Simply put, it opens the narrative itself to absolute interpretive relativity, considering it suggests its own basis in an entirely relative reality. Of course, any form of literature is technically absolutely open to the reader's subjective relation, but to taunt the reader, in the face of utter calamity, with the absolute void of existential uncertainity? Oh Tony Burgess, you're too cruelly fantastic!

Building on this deliciously cruel and uncertain base, the second part of this novel, titled "Part Two: Novel" continues the trajectory of the first half, but follows characters from an even more distanced view, showing instead the fallout of cities in the wake of Acquired Metastructural Pediculosis, which eventually leads to diseased words infecting hosts through comprehension and, of course, creating void cannibal zombies. Far from creating a sense of closure or redemption, Burgess uses the last 130 pages to outline what can only be seen as - literally - a conceptual apocalypse. Following a degenerating AMPS patient, a faceless newscaster, child survivors who turn incestuous husband-and-wife zombie eaters, Burgess breaks apart the logic (if it can be termed so) of the first half of the novel, instead creating spaces of allegorical anti-cultural shock as Ontario seems to implode within its own language. The dark humour of it all is so grotesquely paradoxical that it brims on being absolutely ridiculous, all while keeping just enough reality to keep the narrative grave and heavy. The effect is both oddly heartbreaking and satirical, as an orphaned brother and sister - who can be read as the fallout generation of the pomo apocalypse - give birth to a demon child, fed in utero with the flesh of the last rotting generation. Cruelly, every character introduced in this half of the novel is killed, with the exception of one Higher Power who receives the last confusing line of dialogue of the novel; no conclusive thought, no solution, only cyclical parody and explicit mockery.

This novel exemplifies what I've been sifting through during my research of the Canadian manifestations of the pomo symptom. Far from being the subtler Kroetsches and Cohens of the 70's, these 90's texts are engaging with something entirely different through means entirely more direct. Playing on the culture itself through means of parody, Pontypool Changes Everything exposes a deadened generation bent on the suicide of self-consumption, leading only to a surviving generation of incestuous anti-cultural children living a frightening pantomime of their lost parents.

What exactly does this mean? Well, where exactly does the plague of the nihilism of the 90's lead us?  Is Burgess suggesting that we are a generation of living zombies, enacting a shameful imitation of cultural movements we barely comprehend as we consume the rotting logic of the last generation's language? I think the last line of the book adequately spurs this debate: "Now what?" (276).

While I don't want to be the cynical postmodern subject you all don't know or love, this is an interesting parody of the growth of consumer society and the establishment of a unifying, debilitating spectacle under which contemporary subjects are infected by the structure of their own cognition. Grim! Way to throw gasoline on the post-structuralist bonfire of cultural frameworks, Tony!

Despite this dark apocalyptic vision, at the very least, Burgess is highlighting a problem within an abstract register that is, aside from its insufficiency and synchronic contamination, a machine that humans built and can therefore repair: language. Whether or not this is possible is a greater question for imagaination, though of course, I'm sure a horde of zombies pressing their gummed-up lips against your door might make make the search a tad more urgent.

So, now what?