Elvis Unplugged

Susan Patrick is a librarian at Ryerson Polytechnical University.

Marlis Wesseler’s bizarrely imaginative and amusing first novel tells
the story of a middle-aged woman for whom a stranger’s death becomes a
life-changing experience.

While making the decision to take her dying father off life-support,
May becomes attached to, and then obsessed by, an unknown man, also in a
coma, sharing her father’s room. She believes that this man, who is
Leroy Durocher (which translates from French into “the king of
rock”), may be Elvis. With her own life unraveling, May decides to
join Leroy on his journey to death, but as the hospitals in her part of
Saskatchewan keep closing down, May is forced to follow Leroy from one
remote Northern community to another. Along the way, she tries to trace
Leroy’s background, encounters an assortment of colorful characters,
is harassed by pornographic mail, and tries to sort out her own life.
Solving the mystery of Leroy’s identity becomes incidental as May
emerges reborn following the death experience.

Elvis Unplugged presents a refreshing and entertaining look at a
mid-life crisis that goes right.