Tony Burgess

Tony Burgess (born 7 September 1959) is a Canadian novelist and screenwriter. His most notable works include the 1998 novel Pontypool Changes Everything and the screenplay for the film adaptation of that same novel, Pontypool.

Burgess' unique style of writing has been called literary horror fiction and described as "blended ultra-violent horror and absurdist humour, inflicting nightmarish narratives on the quirky citizens of small-town Ontario: think H. P. Lovecraft meets Stephen Leacock."

Early life Burgess was born in Toronto on 7 September 1959, and grew up in Mississauga. He graduated in 1978 from Applewood Heights Secondary School in Mississauga, despite having to use day passes from a medium security facility in order to finish high school. Burgess served three months in this security facility for robbing a convenience store with a friend while wearing one of his mother's blouses, inspired after watching A Clockwork Orange and Straight Time.

Burgess then moved back to Toronto where he became a fixture on the art and music scene on Toronto's Queen Street West under the name Tony Blue. He performed poetry as an opening act to punk bands and other acts such as Lydia Lunch usually writing what he would be reading, the day of the reading. He also exhibited his paintings, including a solo show at the Xiphotec Gallery and interior and window designs for the Toxic Empire.

During this time, Burgess was banned from Toronto's Hotel Isabella when he drank too much alcohol with a friend and tried to burn the hotel down by lighting paper on top of some of the tables within the hotel.

In 1989, Burgess enrolled at the University of Toronto. Six years later, in 1995 he graduated with a degree in semiotics. In 1998, Burgess and his wife, Rachel Jones, moved from their flat in Toronto's Parkdale neighbourhood to a "shack by the river" in Wasaga Beach, Ontario. At this time, Burgess had a brief musical theatre career during which he starred as Curly in the town's local theatre production of Oklahoma!.

Caesarea This is the third novel in the Pontypool Trilogy.

In this novel something mysterious causes insomnia among the inhabitants of the sleepy little town of Caesarea. This insomnia causes many strange things to happen, such as the town's figurehead mayor being replaced by a dwarf doppelganger and Neo-Nazi environmentalists accidentally unleashing purveyors of kiddie snuff-porn on the town. A so-called war is also being waged between the town's respectable citizenry and the white trash from the trailer park.

Fiction for Lovers: A Small Bouquet of Flesh, Fear, Larvae, and Love This is a collection of nine short prose stories with principal characters "Tony" and "Rachel" who are based on Burgess and his wife. The pieces range across a variety of different genres, from the mundane autobiographical fiction to lurid true crime to phantasmagoria.

Ravenna Gets This is a collection of "wheeled stories" in which the citizens of Ravenna inexplicably and collectively decide to kill off the entire population of the nearby town of Collingwood. Each story revolves around a unique and violent act of homicide.

The inspiration for this novel was news coverage of the fall of Baghdad and its aftermath.

People Live Still in Cashtown Corners This novel is about Bob Clark who lives and works in Cashtown Corners. In fact, he's the only resident of the tiny rural town. Bob has never really felt like himself whenever other people are around, and feeling normal is all he wants in life. One day, Bob decides that the only way to truly be himself is to murder anyone who makes him feel abnormal; which is everyone. The narrator is modelled after John List, a New Jersey man who killed his wife, mother and three kids and successfully eluded arrest for almost 18 years (when he was captured he was living under the name "Bob Clark").

Burgess has described the novel as, "an intimate first-person account of someone who realizes that he must kill others in order to keep his own disintegration at bay and his frantic attempts to rescue secondary versions of himself where this is not true and make them primary."

This novel took Burgess only nine days to finish.

Idaho Winter is Tony Burgess' first novel for young adults, although it has been called a young adult parody.

This is the only novel by Tony Burgess that is not set in an Ontario town.

The n-Body Problem This novel follows a zombie apocalypse that leaves nothing more than a waste disposal problem. After a number of failed experiments at disposal, officials hit on the solution to the problem of aimless, lifeless wanderers clogging the streets: send the dead into orbit. However, the celestial corpses begin to affect the Earth's sunlight, resulting in "Syndrome" – a blend of paranoia, depression, and hypochondria that turns the living into monsters of a different sort.

Film credits Pontypool has been made into live stage productions in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Originally, the film Pontypool was to be a radio play for CBC Radio.

Burgess wrote out a script for Pontypool in 48 hours, his approach inspired by Orson Welles' radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. He also played in the film adaption of Pontypool and in the science fiction film Ejecta.

Burgess has also been a singer with the rock band Lucy Jinx (formally known as Left by Snakes), alongside guitarist Chuck Baker. Burgess and Baker received a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Original Song at the 11th Canadian Screen Awards in 2023 for "The Ascension Song", written for the film Cult Hero.

Screenplay Pontypool (2008) Music from the Big House (2010) Septic Man (2013) Ejecta (2014) Hellmouth (2014) The Hexecutioners (2015) Saturn's Rings (2016) The Hoard (2018) Dreamland (2019) Cult Hero (2022) The Hyperborean (2023) Cashtown Corners (TBA)

Actor Pontypool (Tony(Lawrence)) (2008) Exit Humanity (Victim) (2011) Ejecta (Griffin Jones) (2014) Hellmouth (Tips) (2014) The Hexecutioners (Milos Somborac) (2015) The Hoard (2018) To Hell with Harvey (2019) Cult Hero (2022) The Hyperborean (2023)

Soundtrack Pontypool (The Nefud Desert) (2008)

Nominations/awards Pontypool Changes Everything (Winner, Best Book of 1998 by NOW magazine) Pontypool (Nominated, Best Adapted Screenplay, 2010 Genie Award) Ravenna Gets (Winner, Short Fiction Category, 2011 ReLit Award) Idaho Winter (Nominated, 2012 Ontario Trillium Award)

Recurring themes Burgess often sets his work in the towns and villages of rural Southern Ontario, including Bewdley, Pontypool, Collingwood and Cashtown Corners.

Outbreaks of sudden violence is an idea explored in many of Burgess' works.

Burgess likes to include photos and images in many of his works, such as Ravenna Gets, Idaho Winter and People Live Still in Cashtown Corners. He often takes these photographs himself. He especially likes using pictures that aren't of anything or representative of looking.

Influences When speaking about his beginnings as a writer, Burgess stated, "I recognized early that something was wrong, I was definitely not having the same experience as other people around me, which would just be what it was except there was this peculiar making in the middle of it…. I used to draw at this age, horrible violent, busy pictures that my parents would hide from people and worse."

Burgess' inspiration comes from many different places such as his life, his past, things he sees, people and sometimes tiny random "events."