Blood Sports
THE THIRD AND FINAL BOOK OF THE BRILLIANT AND CAPTIVATING TRICKSTER TRILOGY, FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE SCOTIABANK GILLER-PRIZE FINALIST SON OF A TRICKSTER AND TRICKSTER DRIFT
“Robinson manages to skilfully pull off a series that accomplishes a whole number of things at the same time: this novel—and the trilogy as a whole—is a thrilling, magic-realist adventure story; a compelling domestic novel that explores the various kinds of family: biological, intentional, and community; a grim ride into sadistic darkness (there’s a torture scene that will forever change the way you look at deep fryers); and wickedly funny, hard-edged and sardonic, tender and emotionally true. It’s a coming of age story that spans universes.” — TORONTO STAR
“Eden Robinson builds to an epic and exhilarating supernatural confrontation. What a gift it is, to lose yourself in the final volume of Eden Robinson’s Trickster trilogy. For anyone who is tired of being relentlessly tethered to their personal pandemic reality, Return of the Trickster offers a surreal escape into a familiar but fantastical world.” — THE VANCOUVER SUN
a novel by Eden Robinson
Blood Sports follows the tortured fates of a few of the denizens of the Downtown East Side of Vancouver, the junkie hellhole of North America. They are young, streetwise, twisted souls caught up in drugs, prostitution, porn, and worse.
In the novella “Contact Sports” in Eden Robinson's award-winning collection Traplines, Tom Bauer—an epileptic, 16-year-old slacker—and his mother Christine were living in east Vancouver when Tom's cousin Jeremy moved in with them.
They play an increasingly violent game of cat-and-mouse until Jeremy threatens to hurt Tom's mother. Tom capitulates and lets Jeremy move back in.
Blood Sports is set five years later in Vancouver in 1998. Christine has disappeared. Tom has hooked up with fellow ex-junkie Paulina, and they have recently had a baby named Melody when Jeremy and his henchmen reach out to traumatize them once more. Tom comes home from his job at a corner store to find Paulie and Mel missing, and two thugs waiting for him. The Kafkaesque nightmare that ensues would seem to have no place in the idyllic setting often referred to as Lotusland. By the end of the book, it is hard to think of the west coast—or human relationships—in the same way again.
Using a virtuoso array of voices and techniques, Eden has created a literary thriller packed with black humour that compels readers to turn the page in order to put together the pieces of the puzzle she has created. Whenever you think it can't get stranger, it does—right up until the final surprise: Tom's survival as a much stronger and wiser, although physically and mentally scarred—human being.
PRAISE FOR BLOOD SPORTS
“Like Leonard Cohen, Robinson combines a variety of narrative forms and conflicting styles with such a high degree of technical virtuosity that the very act of reading a cracked and splintered narrative becomes spellbinding, addictive, unstoppable, until the final payoff causes a reader to loop back to the first page and start in reading it again in a quite different and larger way.” — THE GLOBE AND MAIL
“Eden Robinson writes with the violent beauty of a seasoned knifefighter…. She writes with a cool economy, a parsed precision; no wasted words, no wasted motion. In her hands, language is a weapon that can leave you bleeding, unsure of just how you were cut.” — NATIONAL POST
“A gripping page-turner of a tale that should have Quentin Tarantino knocking down her door.” — THE CALGARY HERALD
“Blood Sports is both startlingly original and highly emotionally engaging.” — WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
Read an excerpt
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80,000 words hardcover
Finished books available
RIGHTS SOLD
US eBook: Open Road
Canada: McClelland & Stewart, Jan 2006
ABOUT EDEN ROBINSON
(Photo: Red Works)
Eden Robinson is the author of the bestselling Trickster trilogy, starting with Son of a Trickster (2017), a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a CBC Canada Reads contender. The sequel Trickster Drift (2018) won the Ethel Wilson BC Book Prize for Fiction. The third volume, Return of the Trickster, was called “a gift” by the Vancouver Sun and “funny, tender, and emotionally true” by the Toronto Star. But it is her first novel, Monkey Beach (2000), winner of the Ethel Wilson BC Book Prize and a finalist for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, that is a perennial bestseller and is required reading in schools and universities; 100,000 copies are in print in Canada. Recently Book Riot listed Monkey Beach as one of 22 must-read books by indigenous authors.
In 2017 Eden won the $50,000 Writers Trust of Canada Fellowship. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of British Columbia in 2018. She served on the five-member Scotiabank Giller Prize jury in 2020. In 2022 she was awarded the Blue Metropolis First Peoples’ Literary Prize in Montreal. Currently she is serving on the jury for the Carol Shields Literary Prize for Fiction. A member of the Haisla and Hieltsuk First Nations, she lives in Kitimat, in northern British Columbia near Alaska.
