In Michael Blouin’s Legend, narrative as we know it is torn apart only to be reconstructed piece by piece as the pages progress. Blouin weaves a history of Canadian modern art, Hollywood B movies, and RCMP police procedure in this genre-defying novel that is at once sensual and mind-bending.

Drawing from the lives of celebrities and stories from his personal life, Blouin creates parallel worlds featuring fictive characters who dwell in the artifice of successful stories, as well as the people who inhabit these roles, such as Clint Eastwood in The Eiger Sanction (1975) and the dead body in the Maysles brothers’ film Salesman (1969).

Blouin bends every storytelling trope with documentary techniques to include biographical tidbits and primary sources that lay claim to the conviction that imagination is no less real than so-called reality itself. In so doing, he creates an artistic trajectory of influence and collaboration, revealing a deeply personal relationship to his hometown.

Legend unravels the creative process and the construction of narrative itself without the burden of excessive meta-thinking. Blouin guides us through the lives he has known and encountered, including his own, to show us how we come to perceive the roles we play, the plot twists we grant our own lives, and just how much our communities – real and imagined – can shape us.