Michael Helm was born in Saskatchewan. His most recent novel, Cities of Refuge, is a national bestseller in Canada and was a Rogers Writers' Trust Ficiton Award finalist, a Giller Prize nominee, and a Globe and Mail and Now magazine Best Book of the Year. His earlier novels are The Projectionist, a finalist for the Giller Prize and the Trillium Award; and In the Place of Last Things, a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book. His writings on fiction, poetry, and the visual arts have appeared in North American newspapers and magazines, including Brick, where he serves as an editor. He teaches at York University in Toronto.
After James reminds me of the best of Hawthorne and Poe--Helm
crafts a masterful novel with characters whose realities melt
around them. Unreliable narrators are child's play to him: what he
creates so vividly are unreliable worlds, stitched together with
the creeping assertion that the objects of our perception may be as
deceptive as our minds.--Tristan Charles, Parnassus Books
By turns harrowing and memorable, Helm's tales resonate in an age
of Internet trolling and corrupt pharmaceutical companies, in which
art and science blur ethical boundaries.--Booklist
Dense, fascinating, and genre-defying . . . [After James] not only
raises profound questions about the nature of life and imagination
in the modern world, but actually dares to answer them.--The
Literary Review
Helm's execution is so masterful that it made for one of the most
satisfying reading experiences I've had in years . . . After James
is a new high-water mark in Helm's already remarkable oeuvre, and
solidifies him as one of Canada's most interesting and challenging
novelists.--Quill and Quire, Starred
Helm's triptych of characters haunted by menacing intelligences
that seem to read their minds at every turn is so menacingly
intelligent that I finished it looking over my shoulder to if Helm
was reading my mind. And then I turned back to the first page to
start reading again.--Tom Nissley, Phinney Books
In this kaleidoscopic novel the real and the unreal spiral and
collide to reveal just how thin the line between truth and fiction
really is. Combining elements or horror, mystery, and sci-fi, Helm
has crafted a literary wormhole. Let yourself fall through. You
won't be the same on the other side.--Emily Ballaine, Green Apple
Books
After James is a twenty-first century master class in the use of
genre to explore our ever-changing, and ever-slipping, grasp on
reality. Helm draws on a base of knowledge broad and deep, from
etymology to neuropharmaceuticals, from poetry to cybersecurity, to
craft three murkily connected tales that point toward the best kind
of cosmic disquiet: beyond comprehension and just out of
sight.--Christopher Phipps, DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland
After James is a weird, fantastical read which combines elements of
science fiction, mystery, and horror and creates a wholly original
and expertly crafted novel and easily one of my favorite reads of
2016.--LitReactor
In After James, Michael Helm brings his acute, soulful intelligence
to bear on the question of how we live now. He powerfully evokes
the isolation embedded in our relentless hyper-connectedness. He
gives us his lonely, disappearing people through a dazzling and
intricate array of fictional lenses. The global and the local
collapse and expand again. Language reveals its particulate
secrets. Patterns are noted (or imagined). He shows us the
poignancy in our human need to make sense and the distortions that
come from our endless desire for answers.--Dana Spiotta, author of
INNOCENTS AND OTHERS
Michael Helm's dazzlingly creative work almost defies
categorization. A novel in three distinct, seemingly (or not)
unrelated parts, told from different points of view by unreliable
narrators with waking dreams. I reveled in the language and the
mystery and let it wash over me as I did Kate Atkinson's Life After
Life.--Marion Abbott, Mrs. Dalloways
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