Pulp fiction

Downtown

Something wicked this way comes — and fans of the uncanny are invited to get in on the ground floor.

Local author Dennis Valdron (who publishes as D.G. Valdron) is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to get his latest novel, Squad 13, up and running via his independent publishing imprint, Fossil Cove Publishing. Valdron, who grew up in the Maritimes before moving to Winnipeg to attend law school, draws heavily on slasher film lore.

“With Squad 13, I’m taking all these movies and characters I grew up watching and mashing them together in a riff on popular culture,” Valdron said. “Really, the novel is about Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness meeting the Mattel game Hungry Hungry Hippos.”

The hippos, who enter the rivers of Colombia after escaping the abandoned zoo of infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar, end up becoming possessed by river gods before going berserk.

“You’ve got Colombian drug lords and renegade hippos and environmental stuff,” Valdron explained. “It’s so much fun to write and it’s going to be so much fun to read. It’s one of those things that just takes off, goes right over the top, and just keeps on climbing.”

An Indigenous rights lawyer by trade, Valdron has been writing genre fiction and non-fiction for decades.

“I love my work, I think it’s meaningful and important, but then in the nights I write,” the downtown resident said. “I like genre. I like vampires and spaceships and zombies and knights on horseback. It’s fun. That’s the big thing. And rewarding. It’s a language and literature of possibility.”

Valdron has had many short-stories published in journals internationally and has also had novels published (and forthcoming) by traditional publishing houses. However, when a publishing deal for a non-fiction project he’d worked long and hard on fell through at the 11th hour, he decided to do it himself. Fossil Cove Publishing launched in 2017 with the publication of LEXX Unauthorized: Backstage at the Dark Zone, the first chronicle of a surreal sci-fi series filmed in Halifax, N.S.

“There was so much work involved in this labour of love, so I published it,” he said. “Then I realized I’d published so many short stories over the years, but the market for that was so small, I thought these are good stories, with some accolades, I’ll just publish these. It kind of grew organically from there.”

Since then, Valdron has published a number of his short-story collections and non-fiction works via Fossil Cove, as well as the work of other overlooked writers such as Scott Ellis and R.J. Hore.

“I didn’t go into this with the idea of making megabucks. I just had a bunch of stuff in my hard drive I thought deserved to be out in the world,” he said. “The money’s not great, there’s hardly any. But there are rewards. There’s a feeling of control.”

The Kickstarter campaign, which features several tiers of support, runs until midnight on June 26. At press time, the campaign was nearly halfway to its $1,500 goal. For more information, visit kickstarter.com/projects/891071003/squad-thirteen