Maybe you don’t feel like reading a book right now. I understand completely. Fortunately, reading isn’t the only way to experience a story, especially if it’s full of music and pictures. And so we bring you a bit of a playlist from my newly released novel, The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner.

(Real-life friends and family: keep reading if you want to be able to talk to me like you’ve read my new novel, even if you haven’t got to it yet. Ha!)

The book’s protagonist is looking for meaning, and art is one of the places she looks first. Not at all an elite high-culture consumer, art for Morgan Turner is the movies, TV, music other people have cued up, and books from the stacks at the public library.  Much of it, she doesn’t even like (and, though it doesn’t matter, I don’t like all of it either). But here is a little of what she is watching and hearing.

Movies

In trying to understand evil, Morgan watches scary movies–typical canonical horror like Psycho and The Exorcist and, a little farther afield, Nosferatu. The most important movie in the book, however, is one hardly anyone has seen. It’s a movie about home fire prevention produced for Canada’s National Film Board by the Alberta Native Communications Society for the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs (as it was called in 1975 when the film was made). Its title is He Comes Without Calling. Don’t Google it. Trust me. But please enjoy a few clips of it, including the mesmerizing opening snow-plough scene, right here:

Morgan also watches The Seventh Seal/ Det sjunde inseglet. The first scene, where the Crusader knight returning to Europe plays chess with Death on a rocky beach, is probably what this film is best known for, but don’t miss the final chess scene, in the forest.

Television

The television Morgan ends up watching is much brighter than the films she sees. You’re welcome. It’s Morgan’s coworkers who introduce her to South Korean romantic comedies. Here is one she loves: Secret Garden, where risqué action like this is a big deal.

And here is a show she wants to love but can’t because the heroine falls in love with the wrong boy-band member in the end, stupid You’re Beautiful…

Music

The music in Morgan’s orbit is also out of her control. Sometimes it’s her brother’s electro-goth spooky Skinny Puppy. Sometimes it’s the bittersweet Psychedelic Furs someone is singing along to in her car, and sometimes it’s 我的快乐就是想你 by 陈雅森 。

Many thanks to the cab driver in northern China who had this song playing on repeat one sweltering Saturday morning.

Books

This book has books in it, from the Criminal Code of Canada to the Bible to The Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook itself. The book that figures most prominently is probably a graphic novel version of Inferno from Dante’s Divine Comedy/Divina Commedia. I didn’t have any particular version in mind but I did imagine it illustrated with Gustave Doré’s definitive wood cuttings. Here is one of my favourite pieces from the Paradise book of  the Divine Comedy, the Celestial Rose.

I think it’s probably Morgan Turner’s favourite too.