Reviews

The Celebrated Crad

Thad McIlroy

Crad Kilodney has always been a divisive figure in the Canadian literary community, and the division has never favoured Crad. Standing on the streets of Toronto through much of the 1980s, Crad wore provocative signs—“Slimy Bedtime Stories”; “Literature for Mindless Blobs”—intended to draw attention to his self-published books, books with titles like Putrid Scum and Blood Sucking Monkeys from North Tonawanda; even Crad’s supporters were challenged to mount a defence. Yet attacking his work is the easy part. Defending it takes guts. Celebrating his writing, as Lorette Luzajic does in her self-published Kilodney Does Shakespeare and Other Stories (CreateSpace), is in a league of its own. “In Kilodney’s work you find the heart laid bare,” she writes. “His writing reflects the depths to which all men can sink, but Crad alone among us had the courage to put the ugliness unedited onto the page.” And: “Crad exposes all of it with searing honesty, skewering himself publicly on a bed of coals with his unpardonable ideas. In a way he takes the blame for us, for all of us who self-righteously deny relating to what he is saying.” The book jumps around from interviews with Crad to considerations of his influences, self-reflection by the author and an account of Crad’s last major writing project, “Shakespeare for White Trash,” completed just before his death on April 14, 2014. This is the only book that discusses Crad Kilodney’s life and writing. Luzajic, who became a close friend to Crad, projects her own struggles as an artist onto Kilodney’s work and arrives at an unexpected appreciation of his oeuvre.

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Thad McIlroy

Thad McIlroy is an electronic publishing analyst and consultant, and author of more than two hundred articles and several books on the subject. He lives in Vancouver and at thefutureofpublishing.com.


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