Michael Helm is the author of The Projectionist, a finalist for the Giller Prize; In the Place of Last Things, a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book; and Cities of Refuge, a Globe and Mail Book of the Year. His writings on fiction, poetry and photography have appeared in North American newspapers and magazines, including Brick where he serves as editor. Helm teaches at York University in Toronto and lives in Dundas, Ontario.

After James

A neuroscientist retreats to a secluded cabin in the woods, intending to blow the whistle on a pharmaceutical company and its creativity drug gone wrong. A failed poet is lured to Rome as a “literary detective” to decode the work of a mysterious Internet poet who seems to write about murders with precise knowledge of private details. On the heels of a life crisis, a virologist discovers her identity has been stolen by a conceptual artist in whose work someone always goes missing. After James is an audacious, masterful novel, told in three connected parts, each gesturing toward a type of genre fiction  —  the gothic horror, the detective novel and the apocalyptic.