Devon Code is a fiction writer. He is the author of Involuntary Bliss, a novel, and In A Mist, a collection of stories. His latest fiction can be read in issue 107 of Geist.
In 2010, he was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize. Originally from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, he lives in Peterborough, Ontario, where he teaches at Fleming College.
Even in death, he said, the novella’s power would bind us together, all of us who had read it, appealing as it did equally to our emotions and our intellects.
Situated in modern-day Montréal during a weekend in late August, Involuntary Bliss follows two young men who come together in an attempt to restore their friendship. From the streets of Montréal’s Plateau to the mountainous hillsides of Machu Picchu and beyond, this high-spirited picaresque investigates themes of mortality, idealism, and transgressive art in a novel comprised of incidents by turns comic, erotic, tender, and harrowing. In conceiving of this novel, Code took as influence such works as Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile and Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness.
