Disappearances

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

This innovative first novel is a wildly original combination of farce, fantasy, gothic, and adventure. The hero, Wild Bill, is a lad just on the brink of his fourteenth birthday. Times are bitterly hard in Vermont of the late ‘20s, and the Bonhomme family is in a bad way. Bill’s indomitable, totally and unreasonably optimistic Dad determines to save the situation by making a run across the border into “Canady” to smuggle a load of whiskey into the drought-stricken U.S.A. of the Prohibition era. There follows the most riotous series of cockeyed misadventures that ever befell an expedition, especially one dogged by a fiendish, seemingly indestructible enemy, the demonic Carcajou. Wild Bill’s family has a long history of mysterious disappearances; they give the story a title and the wild adventure a haunting theme that is carried throughout from Dad’s earliest recollections to the days far in the future when Bill himself, a father in his turn, seeks his own elusive young son. This weird and wonderful book has an extraordinary and unforgettable flavour and is peopled by a motley crew of larger-than-life characters well fitted to roister through this tallest of tales.