Those nasty Ivor Wynne-wrecking alien monsters are back ...
Nate Silva is a fairly typical teenager growing up on Somerset Avenue in east Hamilton, near Ivor Wynne Stadium in 2012. He attends high school (out of catchment) at Westmount, has a crush on a pretty girl he believes is out of his league, and does his best to avoid the bullies that hang out on Barton Street.
Typical, except for one important thing - Nate has helped save the planet from an invasion of horrific extraterrestrial creatures summoned to Earth by a strange religious cult that holds midnight meetings at the home of the Tiger-Cats.
The last time the aliens touched down, Nate barely escaped with his life - he's got the scars to prove it - and Ivor Wynne was left in ruins (this is 2012 remember, pre-Tim Hortons Field).
So, the scene is set for The Medusa Deep," the second installment in author David Neil Lee's sci-fi/horror trilogy of young adult novels released by Hamilton publisher Wolsak and Wynn.
The first book - The Midnight Games" - ends with the victorious battle at Ivor Wynne. The Medusa Deep" takes the plotline aboard a vintage 1937 dirigible airship that has somehow managed to adapt itself to intergalactic space travel.
The airship, appropriately dubbed Sorcerer," transports Nate across the country to an undersea abyss off the coast of British Columbia, where another one of the alien monsters is rumoured to exist.
Nate is a smart kid and, like all kids at some time in their lives, he feels a bit like a fish out of water," says author Lee in an interview from his east Hamilton home. He's curious and he looks into what's happening around him, looking for a wider world. And Nate finds himself part of something much bigger and scarier than he ever bargained for. That's what makes it an interesting story, I hope."
Like Nate, Lee lives a couple of blocks west of the football stadium. He has lived in Hamilton since 2002 when he moved from his native British Columbia to obtain a Master's degree in music criticism at McMaster University and, eventually, a doctorate in English literature from the University of Guelph.
When he's not writing, Lee works as an undergraduate English instructor at Wilfrid Laurier University and plays double bass in a free-style jazz trio.
Besides his YA novels, Lee has written the critically acclaimed jazz book The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field." In 2016, The Midnight Games" won Lee the Kerry Schooley Award for the book that best conveys the spirit of Hamilton."
Lee also has a lifelong admiration for the sci-fi horror of H.P. Lovecraft, an eccentric American writer best known for his work published during the 1920s in the pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales."
The drug store paperback stand was a big part of my literary upbringing," Lee, 68, says. I've still got some of the books I purchased at the local pharmacy (in his hometown of Mission, B.C.) as a kid for 50 cents. The pages are old and brown now. Lovecraft had a cosmic talent for prose."
Lee has borrowed many of his alien monsters from the pages of those stories, including the great god Cthulhu (pronounced Kuh-thoo-loo). Lovecraft, who died in 1937 (the same year the fictional airship Sorcerer was built), even makes an appearance in The Medusa Deep."
The Medusa Deep" makes for fun summer reading and is now available at local book stores or through the Wolsak and Wynn website wolsakandwynn.ca.
Lee is now working on the third and final installment in the Nate Silva trilogy, with the action moving back to Hamilton.
If you think the first book made a mess of Ivor Wynne Stadium, just wait until you see what the third book does to downtown Hamilton," Lee says. It will end well, but there will be casualties."