Bleeding Light

Rob Benvie is the author of Maintenance and Safety of War. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Dazed, Vice, Joyland, The Puritan, CNQ, The Best Canadian Essays anthology series, and has been produced widely for film, music, and television. Born and raised in Nova Scotia, he now lives in Toronto.

"Bleeding Light brings us to the edge of where experience mingles with the transcendent, divine intonations take mysterious forms, vapors condense into light.... There is a chasm here that Benvie is exploring—“How to reconcile substance with the insurmountable,” as the novel puts it... This question is at the crux of this novel—the common ground all of the narrative sequences share. How do we reconcile the transcendent with the mundane? The answer to that lofty question appears to be what some of these characters are willing to kill for."—Terence DeToy, Tuerlemot"A darkly gleaming marvel. Searing, creepy and mystical—as if Don DeLillo had set out to steal Paulo Coelho's flock."—Sean Michaels, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and author of The Wagers"Bizarre, terrifying, and wise, Bleeding Light nearly gave me a metaphysical crisis like the crises befalling its disorienting brew of madmen, poets, and visionaries. This swirling and masterful novel is sharp, deliriously patterned, painfully dark and darkly funny: lined with prose that demands to be read and reread, Bleeding Light is everything I hope for in a novel."—Liz Harmer, author of The Amateurs and Strange Loops