Claude Murphy travels to Quebec armed with a magazine contract and a borrowed camera to write an article about a local poetry festival. His first big journalistic break ended in sadness and disappointment when his subject tragically died, so this is his chance to try again. But Murph hadn’t factored in the passion surrounding the Québécois literary scene or anticipated that a simple poetry reading could turn into a riot. When an angry man storms the stage and starts fighting with the poet mid-recital, Murph is knocked unconscious in the chaos. He wakes up with a severe headache, lying in blood seeping from the body of the furious stranger, who is very much dead. Murph flees, believing he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he couldn’t be more mistaken. A conspiracy swirls around him in Lonely When You're Dead by Roy Chaney—one that will almost certainly get him killed.

I enjoyed so many things about Lonely When You're Dead by Roy Chaney. There’s an unpretentious skill with language, using short, punchy sentences that turn a half-marathon into a series of racy sprints. The prose is intelligently crafted, with striking metaphors and similes throughout. Yet hidden in its depths is a wonderfully dry sense of humor that really appealed to me. The narrator often speaks with a tongue‑in‑cheek tone that’s genuinely hilarious. The theme of the novel reminded me of a spirograph, with intersecting circles forming a larger picture. Murphy is desperate to make it in the journalism world, but every time he gets close, disaster spins him right back to where he started. And the characters are interconnected, even though they appear to be strangers at first glance—each one trying to free themselves from the turmoil of their own lives. Jeronimo with his tapes. Catharine with her puppets. And I absolutely loved Murph with his navel‑gazing and his dreams.