Mouthquake — Daniel Allen Cox

Montreal, 1979. A boy's speech starts to fracture along with the cement of le Stade olympique. Do they share a fault line? Daniel Allen Cox's unconventional fourth novel tells the story of a boy with a stutter who grows up and uses sound to remember the past. A coming-of-age tale that telescopes through time like an amnesiac memoir, Mouthquake finds its strange beat in subliminal messages hidden in skipping records, in the stutters of celebrities, and in the wisdom of The Grand Antonio, a suspicious mystic who helps the narrator unlock the secret to his speech. This is a loudly exclaimed book of innuendo, rumours, and the tangled barbs of repressed memory that asks: How do you handle a troubling past event that behaves like a barely audible whisper?

Written with a poetic bravado and in a structure that mimics a stutter, the elegiac Mouthquake is speech therapy for the bent: the signal is perverted and the sounds are thrilling.

Includes an afterword by Sarah Schulman, author of Rat Bohemia and The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination.

Daniel Allen Cox is the author of Shuck, Krakow Melt (both Lambda Award finalists), and Basement of Wolves. He also co-wrote Bruce LaBruce's film Gerontophilia, released in the US in 2015.