I have a thing for experimental and deconstructed genre fiction. Particularly sci-fi and horror. Having seen the cool, clever Pontypool film, I knew this was about zombie-ism spread via language, for a kind of pulp Ben Marcus, straighter but still sharp . But the film turns out to be an aside to this book, a riff, an alternate version, a parallel, a development cutting across this book at a right angle with only a single character and a couple plot-points' intersection. But then, the deconstruct...

The concept is entirely facinating and some of the situations in the book are downright terrifying. However, the book as a whole is a poetic mess. It's poetry/prose fusion is more confusing than anything and hundered my enjoyment of the book. I loved how the book portrayed the after-effects of the event as well. An amazing idea but better realized in the Bruce Macdonald fil madaptaton in my opinion.

Rarely do I find a book that affects me in the same way that Pontypool did.That is, rarely do I find a book so utterly terrible that I had to stop reading it.Ostentibly the basis for the brilliant film Pontypool (Although, at 70% of the way through the novel, nothing had turned up besides the main character of said film, the eponomous town and the virus.)The thing is, the core conceit here is absolutely brilliant: A fresh, inventive take on a genre that's been played out in every conceivable way...

This is a tough one. The use of language and writing style in this book is a bit overcooked for my taste I think. You know what it's like? It's like this one time I took this turbo kick class and it was so over choreographed that I spent the whole time just trying to figure out each move and by the time I did we were on to another one. So in the end I just felt confused and didn't get near the workout that I could have. It's like that.

Edit: An experiment to riff on the book’s self-conscious style in jabber didn't work too well. Calling an author’s first few chapters pretentious, in a review where the first two paragraphs are overly pretentious. Calling and author drunk and stoned, while being drunk and stoned. Talking about lack of structure in a style itself without structure – etc. I retract.

This is a story that is difficult to describe in a few paragraphs. It is on one level an account of the spread of an infectious disorder across the area around a small town in Ontario, Canada. It is on another level an attempt, I believe, to give an insight into madness. It works I feel on both levels. As a Zombie Novel if produces several new ideas, chief among them the idea that an infection can be spread by language itself. This is an idea that was approached by Henry Kuttner in his short sto...

On the one hand, this book has a radical central idea. It’s a Weird Plague story about a disease that hides inside of language. Once you hear and think about the wrong sentences, it infects your mind, driving you to seek revenge against anyone that you have a grudge against. Eventually this language-centric plague drives people to eat each other’s mouths. That’s only the pathology of the disease, which is minuscule in the face of what society goes through. This isn’t the story of an attractive c...

Tony Burgess, Pontypool Changes Everything (ECW Press, 1998)And the award for most-adapted screenplay goes to Bruce McDonald's Pontypool, one of the best films of 2008. I say “most-adapted” because Burgess' screenplay for the film and the book Burgess wrote ten years before the film was released are two entirely different animals. One can't really say that the book is better than the movie or vice versa when comparing them against one another; they must be looked at as two entirely separate, or

I wish I had the words to tell you how wonderful this book really is. It's a book full of lyrical prose, beautiful and terrible imagery, important and wondrous ideas, humour and hardcore horror. Centred around the idea of a zombie virus transmitted by language, the book touches on eye-opening concepts incorporating semiotics and neurolinguistics, as well as tapping into what it means to have a brain injury or mental illness. The horror comes not only from the physical suffering of the victims in...

Sweet Jesus, what a disastrous spew of a creative writing class gone wrong this novel turned out to be.I enjoy zombie movies quite a bit and when I saw 2009's Pontypool, a clever, tight, engaging story about a shock-jock trapped in his radio station as the local countryside falls prey to a most peculiar form of zombie virus, I swore to myself that I would read the novel from which the film was adapted. What a mistake that proved to be.In Pontypool Changes Everything, the land is swept by a langu...

Somewhere in Northern Ontario, near a town called Pontypool, a rabies-like virus has made the jump from biological threat to meme, riding existing sounds from one person to the next and driving them mad. The poor bastards who get infected first lose touch with reality, and then, in frustration, they attack the people around them in a horrorshow of gore and sudden violence. But before they become violent, they spend a lot of time walking around, speaking words that are more or less nonsense, but

Put this one in the self-indulgent look-how-clever-I-can-write category - post modern crap dressed up like a messy zombie novel. I like similes & metaphors as much as the next reader, but having them thrown at you machine gun style - sometimes all in one sentence - is not experimental or enjoyable. It's bad writing, folks. The emperor isn't wearing any clothes. There. I said it. Don't waste your time.

I so desperately wanted to like this book, given its pedigree. Sadly, however, it did nothing for me. Aside from a few instances of better-than-average wordplay (the linguistic/semiotic description of the disease, primarily), it was an uninteresting exercise that, personally, felt absent of all character. As a result, the social associations fell to the ground, limp and lifeless. I can see where and why it might work for other horror fans, but without any strong desire to associate with or under...

Rating clarification: 2.5 StarsPontypool Changes Everything is, to those unfamiliar with the work, the Novel which received the Movie adaptation treatment to become cult Canadian Movie, Pontypool. The Novel itself is also a Canadian work, both in setting and creation: Set in both rural Ontario (beginning in Pontypool, not be confused with Pontypool, Wales) and big city Ontario (such as Toronto), Created by Tony Burgess the Canadian Novelist. Any connection the Book has to the Movie, vice-versa,

I liked the movie and was fascinated by its premise that a deadly virus could be created by and spread through the spoken English language.The book version, though, is kinda like if the screenplay contracted the virus it depicts and becomes a weird disturbing verbal slosh. The author apologizes for the book in the afterword (with the "I was a heady young semiotician!" excuse) and rather than coming off like a sadistic jackass, it made me appreciate his sense of humor and the lengths he went to t...

Pontypool Changes Everyting defies definition in a lot of ways. One of the biggest complaints that gets leveed against it (at least by people that I know) is that it is supposed to be a book about a zombie outbreak and, yet, the zombies in the book are more conceptual than literal. It is difficult to feel afraid of the zombies. But the novel's abstraction is its greatest strength because, at its core, it is a indefatigably complex horror novel.The scariness in Pontypool Changes Everything (which...

Pontypool Changes Everything is one of the most exhausting, extraordinary and bizarre books I have ever read. Burgess has chosen a genre to nest in which expects gonzo thrills, and he sort of provides those but at a cost. For every moment of gruesome unpleasantness, there’s some serious fucking about with narrators, characters, genre tropes and especially languageBecause Burgess is obsessed with language being unstable here. He creates metaphors that cut out the middle man and unsettle you as yo...

Trippy, unnerving horror. Just when you think you're already in the deep end, 'Pontypool changes everything' submerges you even further. This novel is crazy. But crazy-good. It's like reading the fiction of a certified lunatic, albeit a very talented one. Simply put, Pontypool is a zombie story, but one unlike anything you've ever read before. Burgess doesn't just turn the genre on its head, he decapitates it, then sews on a Frankenstein-like replacement made from sections of his own fractured p...

Before there was meaning, there was a virus that became entertwined with, and created, life itself. It's in everyone's DNA already; you're already "infected."If you hear someone in whom this virus has been awakened, you start to lose meaning, until this loss of meaning makes it impossible to distinguish whether meaning exists or not. Hint: it doesn't really.Where the virus is too strong, it extinguishes itself, kills everyone, burns itself out. Weaker strands survive, allowing the illusion of me...

As anyone who saw me reading this is well aware, this isn't really a book about zombies. I mean, it is. But it's also about language. Burgess' fascination with language and semiotics underpins this entire work, a fact that endows the novel with a linguistic playfulness while allowing the author to toy and tinker with ideas of lanuage, concept and understanding. The novel sort of meanders, occasionally becoming surreal and almost dadaist, and though this may detract from the work as a whole, it d...