While working to restore an historic theatre in a seedy part of the city, a graduate student named Anthea searches to find her best friend, lost to the rhetoric of an itinerant street mystic. Almost a century earlier, Liam, a tenth-rate tenor, visits the same theatre while eking out a career on the dying Vaudeville circuits of the day. In both eras, an apocalyptic strain of mysticism threatens their existence: Anthea contends with a nascent New Age movement in the heart of the city while Liam encounters a radical theosophical commune along the coast of British Columbia, who appear to be building ... something.
The Paradise Engine unfolds across a colourful backdrop of labour organizers, immaculately-attired cultists, ambitious socialites, basement offices and coffee shops. Its cast of characters and historical setting recalls Robertson Davies' Fifth Business or Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, while its approach to memory and community is reminiscent of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.
Praise for The Paradise Engine
"[a] mystifying story that melds the Vaudeville era of Vancouver history with contemporary Vancouver."
~ BC Bookworld
"Rebecca Campbell brings intelligence and mystery to this strange indie tale."
~ Thomas Hodd, Telegraph-Journal
"What The Paradise Engine invites us to consider is the form, the meaning, and the price of going on. Immortality, the story warns us, always demands a sacrifice."
~ Jennifer Quist, The Rusty Toque
