Doughnut Hole City
The story takes place in a dystopic version of Toronto in the future. The state of the city is described using simple but vivid imagery introduced to the reader in the form of a newspaper headline: “TORONTO: THE MAKING OF A DOUGHNUT HOLE.” When one character asks another what that means he explains to her, and the reader, that it is a term used to describe a city in which the urban population center collapses and sends the masses radiating outward to resettle in the surrounding suburban areas.
Zombies
This story contains zombies. The main difference is that a zombie in its original dark magic conception is a purposeful creation of a practitioner, such as a witch doctor, and serves at the bidding of its creator. There are no hordes of mindless undead. Instead, the zombie is a very precisely individualized being whose defining characteristic is being at the completely mercy of the person who made them a zombie. The terms zombie and duppy are used fairly interchangeably in the novel with the fundamental divergence being that a zombie is of more limited use because of the limitations of what it can be made to do. The significance of how these creatures differ from the cinematic presentation of zombies is that the zombie and duppy can be used as imagery for symbolic commentary. Because they represent a being that has lost all free will and autonomy, the imagery describing their control by others allows them to be used as symbolic commentary on everything from racial discrimination to drug addiction.
Change of Heart
The opening scene of the novel is a tense, fast-paced introduction of the fuel that powers the engine of the plot: the desperate call to find a human heart for transplant into the political leader of Toronto, Premier Uttley. As the plot develops, it reveals that the Premier’s policies have been unduly influenced by corrupt interests that have resulted in decisions deemed heartless by the needy underclass. Eventually, a heart is found and the transplant takes place, but due to the introduction of the black magic aspect of the story, the heart begins to take over the body of the Premier so that her literal change of heart results in a symbolic change of heart which causes her to reverse her heartless policies. This is an example of imagery that synthesizes the literal and the figurative to become a central element in the storyline.
The CN Tower
The defining architectural structure in Toronto is the CN Tower, at the of time publication a record-breaking freestanding structure. It is still considered an impressive monument to the technological innovation of the 20th century since it was built as a means to facilitate broadcast communications adversely impacted by upward architectural development. In the book, however, the CN Tower has become the headquarters of the criminal boss controlling the city until eventually the tower is seen as the means of bringing about his downfall. “She thought of the building she was in. The CN Tower. And she understood what it was: 1,815 feet of the tallest centre pole in the world. Her duppy body almost laughed a silent kya-kya, a jokey Jab-Jab laugh. For like the spirit tree that the centre pole symbolized, the CN Tower dug roots deep into the ground where the dead lived and pushed high into the heavens where the oldest ancestors lived. The tower was their ladder into this world.” The imagery presented here juxtaposes ancient dark magic myth in the form of a duppy (zombie) using the architectural wonder of the Tower as a means to broadcast messages to the dead to use the tower as means of conveyance from the underworld.
