Tony Burgess

It was built in 1882 and at one point served the community's funerary needs and has a yard that is rumoured to be riddled with suitcase graves filled with pet cats from a previous owner.

Burgess is good friends with fellow Canadian novelist Derek McCormack.

Burgess has also published criticism, fiction and poetry in numerous national and international newspapers, journals, periodicals and magazines.

This trilogy includes The Hellmouths of Bewdley, Pontypool Changes Everything and Caesarea.

This is the first book in the Pontypool Trilogy.

This is a collection of sixteen short stories, featuring such things as insane doctors, supernatural dogs, dead men, and a real ninja turtle, all within the small Ontario town of Bewdley.

This is the second novel in the Pontypool Trilogy.

In this novel, an outbreak of a strange plague, AMPS (Acquired Metastructural Pediculosis), causes people across Ontario to slip into aphasia and then into a cannibalistic zombie rage.

AMPS is transferred through language and the only way to stop its spread is to outlaw communication.

This metaphysical, deconstructionist virus requires a multi-disciplinary approach and doctors, semioticians, linguists, anthropologists, and even art critics present theories as to its source and treatment.

The director of the movie adaptation of Pontypool Changes Everything, Bruce McDonald has described the virus as having three stages, "The first stage is you might begin to repeat a word. Something gets stuck. And usually it's words that are terms of endearment, like sweetheart or honey. The second stage is your language becomes scrambled and you can't express yourself properly. The third stage is that you become so distraught at your condition that the only way out of the situation you feel, as an infected person, is to try and chew your way through the mouth of another person."

McDonald also stressed that the victims of the virus detailed in the film were not zombies, instead calling them "conversationalists."

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.

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.

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.

This novel is about Bob Clark who lives and works in Cashtown Corners.

Tony Burgess (born 7 September 1959) is a Canadian novelist and screenwriter.

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.

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."

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!.

Burgess has also at one time played in a band called The Ether Brothers, and had jobs as a telephone psychic and as a factory worker at a vinegar factory.

Burgess currently resides in Stayner with his wife of fourteen years, Rachel Jones, who is a crown attorney.

They have two young children, Griffin and Camille.

Their current home is a house that is known by the town as the supposedly haunted former Thistlewaite residence.