BLASTED - a novel by Kate Story

Book Launch: Thursday, August 28 at 8pm.

Blasted is the story of Ruby Jones: irreverent, exuberant, and troubled. Lurching between love affairs and cities, she is haunted by mysteries that surround her father and generations before. Steeped in Newfoundland folklore, Blasted mines a rich vein of experience, layering the mundane and the magical, evoking the forces that inhabit the land. The narrative shifts between generations and geographies, between contemporary life and stories as old as the Hill that looms over Ruby’s birthplace. Vivid characters surround her: her irascible grandfather, elegant Cree artist Blue, her whiskey-slugging Aunt Queenie, and others, sinister and unexplained. When Ruby unravels at last, she must face the demons that pursue her.

Kate Story will be reading from her novel accompanied by musicians Curtis Driedger and Derek Bell who will be underscoring the reading with original compositions, morphing into traditional and contemporary songs and back again, evoking the moods and themes of Blasted.

Presented by Cooked and Eaten Reading Series and Artspace, the launch of Blasted published by Killick Press (St. John’s) will be the kick-off for an eastern tour, taking in Toronto, Montreal, Fredericton, Liverpool, Broad Cove, Halifax, and St. John's.

Admission to the launch is free. Artspace is located at 378 Aylmer St. N. in Peterborough. Copies of the book will be for sale at the launch. For more information about the tour and the book you can check out the author’s website at www.katestory.com.

Blasted has received advance praise by some of Newfoundland’s most respected writers, including River Thieves author Michael Crummy, who declared the book “raw and strange and hilarious and affecting.” Anne Hart, a St. John’s-based biographer and specialist in Newfoundland studies, called it “an irresistible first novel.”

“Kate Story’s debut novel is an unlikely marriage of Newfoundland’s oldest traditional lore with the contemporary urban world of St. John’s and Toronto. The result is raw and strange and hilarious and affecting. Ruby Jones—itinerant waitress, sometime nude model, budding alcoholic—admits early on that tenderness and rage are her ‘heart language.’ Blasted offers both in spades.” - Michael Crummey

“In Blasted, Kate Story pulls her readers into the vivid and chaotic world of young Ruby Jones, a fairy-led Newfoundlander with inner demons to slay both in southside St. John's and Queen Street Toronto. An irresistible debut novel.” - Anne Hart

“I am as delighted as other readers will be with this young Newfoundland writer. With talent and patience Kate Story has unearthed another of the many mysteries hidden within the Southside Hills.” - Bernice Morgan

Writer, performer, and choreographer Kate Story was born and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland, in a house built by her great great grandfather beneath the Southside Hill. Her short fiction has been published in magazines including Broken Pencil Magazine, Takeout, and Kiss Machine (and upcoming in B.P.'s best fiction anthology, ECW Press 2009). Her written performance works have been produced as plays, performance art, and theatre-dance productions in Ontario (Toronto, Peterborough) and Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John’s). She has been twice nominated for the Ontario Arts Council’s K.M. Hunter Artist Award. Blasted is her first novel.