From the opening line, “Fog coils over Conception Bay,” False Bodies pulls you in with an inky stare and never lets go. Both chilling and droll, the supernatural tale with an eco-slant opens with the mass death of rig workers on the Harvey Queen, an offshore-oil platform in Newfoundland. The bodies are whisked away to a hospital and family is barred from seeing them, but rumours abound of puncture marks from the tentacles of a giant squid – the legendary “kraken” or “devilfish.”

Through magnificent language play and mercurial plot twists, author J.R. (Joel) McConvey explores the mysteries of a marine world in a rich horror-filled tale of corporate greed that he describes as Come From Away meets Alien. A friend alerted McConvey to an incredible story in Newfoundland, which has been a hotbed for monster squid sightings over the decades.

“I love Newfoundland,” McConvey tells me from his home in the Toronto neighbourhood of Etobicoke, where he lives with his wife, Amy, and nine-year-old daughter, Danica. “It’s one of the places in Canada that loves its stories the most. And St. John’s has so many – so much history.”

Those stories helped build the world of False Bodies, peopled with enthralling characters, including the 19th-century naturalist Reverend Moses Kane; Haxan Corp.’s ruthless chief innovation officer Rolle Beckson, who can “play the press scrum like a finger piano”; and the protagonist, a cryptozoologist dubbed Eddie “the Yeti” Gesner because of his size and body shape. Waggish, sly, with an undercurrent of sadness, Eddie finds Rev. Kane’s 1873 diary describing the existence of a giant squid, which prompts his search for the truth about what happened to the rig workers. Along the way, he is ambushed by fake cephalopods and female demons, possibly concocted by Cepha, the high priestess of the Black Ocean cult, or Haxan Corp., or the super squid itself.

McConvey’s debut novel follows Different Beasts, a collection of short stories that questioned whether humans are the real beasts, and won the 2020 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for speculative fiction. False Bodies, with its focus on environmental degradation caused by resource extraction, contemplates what is sacred: money or nature. 

You can’t manage that balancing act without chops, and McConvey has been writing stories for years, publishing them in literary journals like The Malahat Review. He is also a documentary producer, but fiction is his “primary passion.” One of his favourite early books was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle,  with the famous first line, “It was a dark and stormy night.” “Think about all the things that can happen on a dark and stormy night,” McConvey says. “You might end up in a different dimension! It’s impossible for me not to want to explore that.”

Susan Grimbly: Where did you get the idea for False Bodies?

J.R. McConvey: This book was inspired by the weirdest story, I think, in Canadian history. Moses Harvey was a cleric – a Presbyterian reverend – in St. John’s in the 1870s, and a passionate amateur naturalist. The story goes that one day this kid came to his door and asked if he wanted to buy the horn of a big squid, by which he meant the arm or the tentacle, which had reportedly been hacked off by a fisherman off the coast of Portugal Cove during a random squid attack. … A couple of days later, another squid washes up, and they call Moses Harvey because they know that he’s the squid guy now, and they have a half a squid preserved with the beak still there. He brings it home and displays it in his parlour.

SG: Where did you discover that wild story?

JRM: A friend found it in a blog and sent it to me. [He said], ‘Let’s go to Newfoundland and see what’s in the archives,’ because there is this big preserved giant squid in one of their galleries. We went to Memorial University, and I did a bunch of digging there. It’s a big squid epicentre.

SG:  Let’s jump from giant squid to giant character. How did you craft the persona of Eddie the Yeti, who’s tall and ungainly. He makes fun of his shape and size throughout the novel.

JRM: I wanted to create a horror noir. So, ultimately, it was born out of the idea that what people really connect to are characters. He had to be humble, but [also] monstrous. … Big people command a room, but when you flip it around, their lives can be difficult. You’ve got this quality that makes you formidable, but also is secretly something causing you suffering. I wanted to play with that idea that our bodies can define who we are.

SG: Tell me about the women, such as Amelia Keane, the local detective, who is trying very hard to uphold the law, despite backroom dealings. And Yumi, the assassin with a “wakizashi” sword and Rolle Beckson’s underling, who will force Eddie to do his bidding. 

JRM: Amelia understands what it’s like to be trapped in a certain structure. You agree to be a cop because you want to get things done and do them right, and then you encounter corruption, sexism, barriers.

Yumi [is] a ridiculous character, but I wanted to add the story about her origin, that her grandmother was a “comfort woman” for Japanese soldiers. Yumi is not so much a femme fatale but a manifestation of pure anger and violence that is the result of this bloodline that has been exploited by powerful men. 

SG: The coldest man, is Rolle Beckson, the chief innovation officer of Haxan Corp., which bought the offshore platform. He’s a tech billionaire with absolutely no conscience. Ultimately he traps poor Eddie in a giant bubble 700 feet below sea level, with just enough oxygen to barely stay alive. Did you go full-on James Bond at that point? 

JRM: I did. Some of the response to the book has been, ‘it’s awesome, but I wish the villain had a little bit more depth.’ Even my editor asked, ‘Is he evil or is he stupid?’ We still really want a certain quality from our villains, but the true villains of our time are cruel idiots. … That’s what I wanted to capture with Rolle. So I took this James Bond approach, because, you know, you think about [Elon Musk’s] SpaceX, that’s what it is. It’s a James Bond villain trying to get to space and colonize the moon.

SG: I’m wondering if your novel’s Harvey Queen incident was based on the Ocean Ranger disaster in 1982? 

JRM: Part of the contextual background for the story of Newfoundland, to me, is resource extraction, and one of the resources that gets extracted from that place is people. They get taken advantage of, sometimes fatally. I think labour and how we use the resources there is a big part of that story, too. And the Ocean Ranger is a tragedy that haunts the place. 

SG: The ending – without giving it away – wraps up beautifully. Do you consider yourself a spiritual person?

JRM: My spiritual portal, I guess, is nature. That’s one of my core themes: How do we exist in relation to nature? I was just in Ireland, and we went out to the end of Sheep’s Head, which is this big, long peninsula in the southwest. You get out to the very tip, and it’s just raw Atlantic all the way across. Those moments are the ones where I think it’s undeniable that there’s some energy in the world that courses throughout this stuff. 

SG: What else do you have on your plate?

JRM: I report for a trade publication called Biometric Update. … I write a lot about identity verification and facial recognition and data privacy policy. Some of it will probably start to show up in the fiction eventually.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.