Writer, performer, and choreographer Kate Story was born and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland, in a house built by her great great grandfather beneath the Southside Hill. Her short fiction has been published in magazines including Broken Pencil Magazine, Kiss Machine, and the Cooked and Eaten Takeout anthology (and upcoming in B.P.'s best fiction anthology, ECW Press 2009). Her written performance works have been produced as plays, performance art, and theatre-dance productions in Ontario (Toronto, Peterborough) and Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John’s). She has been twice nominated for the Ontario Arts Council’s K.M. Hunter Artist Award. Blasted is her first novel.

Blasted is the story of Ruby Jones: irreverent, exuberant, and troubled. Lurching between love affairs and cities, she is haunted by mysteries that surround her father and generations before. Steeped in Newfoundland folklore, Blasted mines a rich vein of experience, layering the mundane and the magical, evoking the forces that inhabit the land. The narrative shifts between generations and geographies, between contemporary life and stories as old as the Hill that looms over Ruby’s birthplace. Vivid characters surround her: her irascible grandfather, elegant Cree artist Blue, her whiskey-slugging Aunt Queenie, and others, sinister and unexplained. When Ruby unravels at last, she must face the demons that pursue her.

“Kate Story’s debut novel is an unlikely marriage of Newfoundland’s oldest traditional lore with the contemporary urban world of St. John’s and Toronto. The result is raw and strange and hilarious and affecting. Ruby Jones—itinerant waitress, sometime nude model, budding alcoholic—admits early on that tenderness and rage are her ‘heart language.’ Blasted offers both in spades.”
- Michael Crummey

“I am as delighted as other readers will be with this young Newfoundland writer. With talent and patience Kate Story has unearthed another of the many mysteries hidden within the Southside Hills.”
- Bernice Morgan

“In Blasted, Kate Story pulls her readers into the vivid and chaotic world of young Ruby Jones, a fairy-led Newfoundlander with inner demons to slay both in southside St. John's and Queen Street Toronto. An irresistible debut novel.”
- Anne Hart

www.katestory.com