Eliza Robertson captures something often ignored about the B.C. coast in Demi-Gods, her quiet, menacing first novel. There’s a coldness to the place, an absence among all that splendour. It’s a fitting place to set a story so suffused by the missing, physical and otherwise. A coming-of-age story told over decades in discrete chunks, Demi-Gods opens on Salt Spring Island and peaks years later, off the California coast. Episodic and spare, it jangles with deceptive pace. Robertson’s unlikely verbs drive the narrative through escalating encounters that are queasy, violent and increasingly sexual. Demi-Gods exceeds the expectations Robertson set with Wallflowers, her intriguing if uneven first book of short stories, but the momentum fades in the back half. And the scenes set in California lack the viscera Robertson, who grew up in Victoria, brings to those in B.C. On the whole, though, Demi-Gods is an uncomfortable, propulsive and deeply enjoyable read. It has an air of coastal gothic to it, a sense of chaos barely restrained amid all the calm. Richard Warnica, Weekend Post
