On a three-tiered stage in the Ontario countryside, the mellifluous voice of an auctioneer can induce grizzled farmers to buy broken shovels. His two sons help out with the business, but it’s his strangely mute young daughter who seduces auction-goers with her elaborate vintage costumes. When she disappears, the younger brother — now a Montreal film professor — begins a lifelong search that ultimately leads him to the silent, experimental cinema of Molly O.

 

In this tale of unshakeable dreams, the songs of Rodgers and Hart may contain secret messages, a country road seems to stretch timelessly into the distance and the firm earth in the backyard may well turn into quicksand. Molly O explores an unstable world where nothing is certain except what we hope for.

Mark Foss is an Ottawa-based writer whose journalism and short fiction have appeared in such publications as The Globe and Mail, The New Quarterly and Blood and Aphorisms. In 1997 he began work on his first book, a collection of linked stories entitled Kissing the Damned, which was published in 2005 and long-listed in 2006 for the ReLit awards. Kissing the Damned was praised by the Danforth Review, Embassy Magazine and Ottawa Life Magazine and was featured at your 10th anniversary Ottawa Writers Festival in the Fall of 2006. His short stories have also appeared in two anthologies, and a radio drama was aired on CBC New Voices. Spoilers is his first novel.

Mark Foss' profile page

“Foss’s prose flows smoothly … captivating the reader with cinematic sensibility. The author keeps us entertained with humorous wordplay and tinges of absurdity.”

Montreal Review of Books

“This is not a book with a conventional plot, but it does have finely drawn characterisations with an attention to detail and an elegance of writing that skims the surface of John Steinbeck … The elusive Candy is a fascinating character: unique, intangible, the centre of the obsessional behaviour of more than one of the inhabitants of this extraordinary book … Molly O remains enigmatic to the end.”

The Progzilla Files

“A wonderfully imagined piece of fiction … fascinating, well-told.”

The Sun Times

The search for Molly O is worth it

by Gambled

This book is an enthralling, dream-like portrait of one weird little eastern Ontario family of auctioneers with dead parents: father (very recent) and mother (long ago) ...and a missing sister who seems at times to have existed and other times, well you have to wonder.

There is an element of humour throughout. The childhood recollections are very warm recollections of a simpler time of TV westerns and putting on shows for the neighbours. But something is a little bent.

There is a dash of Robertson Davies here and John Irving there in the characters. This is in the sense that the hero (or the protagonist) is not always heroic, but imperfect and somewhat damaged ... strange.

The two main female characters - Molly and (to a lesser extent) her mother -- are extremely influential in the lives of the other characters, yet they don't have their own voices. Mom is dead and the daughter does not speak, by choice it seems. The older brother is one uptight dude who can't stand being back in his family home without fearing that he will relapse to a very bad place. The younger brother (our damaged hero, perhaps) is a more than a little messed up by his sister's disappearance. (This makes him an excellent university film studies prof, by the way.) We see the world, mainly through his eyes with his unwavering belief that Sis will be home any minute... like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin.

And Molly O... well, she sits there right between her brothers as a bone of contention whether she is in the room or not. She could be the real hero of this book having left her indelible mark on her brothers' lives despite the years that have passed; and on the world via a series of art house erotica directed by a now dead American artiste eccentric (another one!) from just across the Saint Lawrence Seaway.

And that, is just the beginning of the story... before the guru, the clingy girlfriend, her doofus teenage son and the most classic of progressive rockers of the 1970s wind their way into the story.