Under a Collapsing Sky

The altered-right government has won the 64th presidential election. Meanwhile, universities have gone on strike, vaccinations against the looming bio-plague are rolling out, and a trade embargo with the East has forced Europe and North America to unite under USENA. In an era almost schizophrenically poised between religious fanaticism and a mania for scientific hegemony, all that remains is the hideousness of a world defiantly resisting change.

Across a polyphony of five different perspectives, readers are "evented" through the biological heresy portrayed in Brandon W. Teigland's debut novel Under a Collapsing Sky. At its centre is the mysterious drug Phoenix Tears, an unknown brain parasite which, once metabolised, could be capable of either bringing on the bliss of metamorphosis, or the ritual murder of those looking for a cure.

BRANDON W. TEIGLAND is an emerging Canadian writer of speculative and literary fiction. He studied Neuroscience, Philosophy and Literature at both Dalhousie University and King's College in Halifax, NS.

What Readers and Authors are saying about Under a Collapsing Sky: 

"Brandon Teigland's Under a Collapsing Sky revels in the terrifying entanglement of life as it flies in the face of individualism as a survival strategy. His vision of a possible future is so possible that it fascinates as it horrifies, invading the mind and becoming the inescapable present. With uncommon insight and in searingly precise language, Teigland asks: if individuality is a mass delusion, and one that has led our species toward ruin, who, or what, will replace the 'I'? Under a Collapsing Sky is as much about our end as it is about the all too natural consequences of today's actions, an uncanny and prescient novel that responds to ongoing ecological and social crises in ways shockingly new while entirely of our moment."-Kyle Flemmer, Founder of The Blasted Tree / Author of Barcode Poetry

"Brandon W. Teigland's debut novel Under A Collapsing Sky opens with lines from "After a Death" by Swedish poet Tomas Transtrmer. "It is beautiful to feel your heart throbbing / But often the shadow feels more real than the body." These lines are a perfect opening for a novel that investigates a kind of corporeality and embodiment that goes beyond physicality- it steps into that shadow space where the body engages with the physical and ethical concerns of biology and society within a "privatized apocalypse." Teigland's novel is complex, layered, with multifaceted protagonists and a mysterious drug called Phoenix Tears. This debut is wholly original, timely, and will not be easily forgotten." -Amy LeBlanc, Author of Unlocking and I Know Something You Don't Know