Dead Reckoning

About the Book

Every pilot knows the shock of waking from some private reverie part way through a cross-country flight to the unsettling realization that he no longer knows where he is. Even over the most familiar terrain, if he has not been diligent in his navigation, straying just a few miles off course can lead to complete disorientation. Nothing below him makes sense, standard landmarks: lakes, rivers, hills, towns, highways, no longer correspond to anything on the chart he is now frantically fingering on his lap. While he was not looking, the world beneath him shifted into the strange.

Such is the plight of the characters in this collection of stories: people who find, in one way or another, unexpectantly, their realities have shifted and they are 'flying by the seat of their pants.'

A fishing guide discovers the roles have been reversed on him when a customer leads him into a familiar world turned inside out; the mundane routine of a neighbourhood coffee shop takes on new dimensions of time and space; the long nights of a northern winter are the backdrop for redefining the meaning of 'alien' to a young airport worker; these stories and others seek to reveal how easily, and without warning, we can lose our way.

About the Author

Garry McKevitt lives in Brentwood Bay on Canada's west coast. He graduated with a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria in 1978 where he stayed on for ten years directing and editing educational television programs for Continuing Education and the University of Victoria Television Productions. Previous to that he edited, for four years, Nesika, a monthly newspaper published by the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs.

McKevitt has published both short stories and poems in various publications, including The Malahat Review and Illusion, an anthology of fiction published by Aya Press in Toronto. At present, when he is not idling away time in coffee shops, playing bass guitar in the basement band, L.S. Crude, golfing, or, when it can no longer be avoided, writing, he can be found drifting over the constantly surprising and perpetually strange terrain of British Columbia in his Cessna 172, "HJM".