CITIZENS OF LIGHT

"Sam Shelstad has a funny, lively, engaging, peculiar mind - charming and surprising."
-Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood, finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize

Debut novel CITIZENS OF LIGHT by Sam Shelstad melds the dark vision of a writer like Flannery O'Connor with the plot sense of hardboiled crime authors such as Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.

A telemarketer named Colleen awakes to the news that her husband Leonard's body has been found in a bog, far from their home in Mimico, a neighborhood in Etobicoke (*a suburb of Toronto). A strange man attends the funeral. When Colleen approaches the man, he lies about his connection to Leonard and then slips away. Months later, Colleen spots the stranger in the background of a newspaper photograph and discovers that he works at a casino in Niagara Falls. Colleen believes this man knows - or could even be responsible for - what happened to Leonard and so she and her pushy co-worker Patti set out to solve the mystery of her husband's disappearance.

The investigation soon pulls them deep into the twisted and seedy underworld of Niagara Falls, with its shifty haunted house proprietors, incarcerated cult leaders, scam artists, and a threatening reindeer within an online computer game. As the novel progresses, we also move deeper into Colleen's mind, and the dark, psychological consequences of her hunt.

Sam Shelstad's work has appeared in literary magazines including The New Quarterly and Joyland. He was longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize and was a runner up for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize and he recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Victoria. CITIZENS OF LIGHT is Sam Shelstad's first novel, he is at work on his next idea.