Walkups
Contributors: Justin Stephens (designer and photography), Andy Brown (editor)
Edition: 2nd edition (new material with author's note)
Publisher: Conundrum Press
Published: August 2009
Place of publication: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Format: 2nd (redux) edition
Number of pages: 140
ISBN-13: 9781894994378
Subjects: Fiction; Novella; Architecture
Genres: Fiction; Novella
Description: Lance Blomgren’s captivating novella takes place entirely indoors, up the steel staircases and behind the brick walls of Montreal’s distinctive row-house apartments. Inside these rooms the people who call these spaces home are collectively beginning to sense that something is not quite right. Time is becoming noticeably slower, and things that were once unnoticeable or even invisible—are suddenly impossible to ignore. 

Composed as series of documentaries depicting actual Montreal apartments, this book offers an intimate architectural tour of the city that is in turns humourous, erotic, and deeply unsettling. Walkups is a strikingly original work by a writer who the Montreal Review of Books has called “a human conveyer belt of ideas and images.”
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“After reading this book, it was difficult for me to pass a residential building and not look twice at its curtained windows.”
— Michael Turner, author of 8 X 10

“A narrative of loss, paranoia and psychological collapse against a panoramic swirl of poetically rendered human detail…one of the most impressive literary debuts of the year.” 
—Toronto eye weekly

“Blomgren looks for the truth in the ordinary, the mythical in the mundane.... Walkups is a playfully engaging invitation to a maze of truth and lies.”  
— Montreal Review of Books

“Blomgren’s perspective is that of the spying neighbour who knows the daily habits and neuroses of the people living nearby but not their names.... Blomgren’s skill as a writer lies in the way he seduces the reader and maintains such voyeuristic titillation.”
— NOW Magazine

“Evocative…For an ex-Montrealer, Walkups is a tonic”
— Montreal Gazette

"After reading a dozen or so of these voyeuristic pieces, a feeling starts to grow. Like a cancer, a general psychological malaise sets in. The images of the second-hand furniture begin to fill your head, the dirt of a hundred former residents follows. You start to feel like you are in a room coated with decades of second-hand smoke. And then it hits you."
--The Link
Notes: Originally published in 2000, this new unexpurgated edition features numerous previously unpublished sections and an afterword by the author.
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