Listening for the Rumble

On a rainy October evening, Leo bikes forty kilometres into the country to see his mother. He’s tormented at not knowing who his birth father was, and she’s always refused to tell him. Leo wants connection, he wants to belong. Is he related to the family in a nineteenth-century photograph found in an antique store? He’s determined to find out, but things only get worse when his girlfriend takes off and doesn’t come back.  Roaming the poor streets of a university town, travelling a pioneer road in the dark, and later tramping the university’s corridors and quadrangles, he meets other lonely souls—a little boy with no father, a stoned philosophy student who spends his days listening to heavy metal and his nights listening to short-wave radio, a silent Goth with piercings and slashed clothing, and a poetry professor who, sinking into madness, claims that Leo can never understand the Romantics. Played out at the end of autumn and the start of winter, Leo’s quest takes him through the time of transition between the twentieth century and the twenty-first. Surrounded by the remains of the past century—including a 1985 Buick Riviera—and vestiges of the nineteenth, he’s searching for roots, and for something solid in a shifting world.