Delirium

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

“It was a cold September day, otherwise undistinguished, in the early
stages of Mr. Price’s sojourn in the forsaken city of Toronto, that he
first looked out into the gray plaza to see a young girl dancing in
front of a paper cup filled with coins.” This scene from Delirium is
more than a little reminiscent of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre
Dame, and Delirium also includes an evil genius, a physically deformed
but spiritually wholesome hero, and a midnight journey down a Toronto
manhole.

The central character, Ariel Price, is a world-renowned architect who
has been hired by Toronto’s leading financial conglomerate to design a
world-class office tower. The resulting structure mimics its creator
exactly—an impressive facade concealing a labyrinth of unspeakable
horrors and insatiable emptiness. Although the building is Price’s
masterwork, its completion puts him in the sights of Theseus Crouch, an
unethical biographer who sees the ruin of Price’s reputation as the
ticket to his own fame and fortune. Price, regretting the effort more
than the actual act, decides that he will have to kill Crouch.

Cooper, author of the critically acclaimed Amnesia (1992), is something
of an intellectual magpie. He’s built Delirium’s storyline with
hefty blocks of biblical exegesis, architectural theory, and
philosophical asides, all held together with bolts of playful puns and
often brilliant prose. Once in a while he goes a little too far, with
phrases like “thoughts dance down the chain of being to fornicate
evilly on the fecal floor of Price’s caged soul,” but there is so
much to admire in this book that most readers will not mind having to
dodge the occasional runaway metaphor.