Toronto writer Claudia Dey. (Don Kerr/Coach House Press)

To outsiders, Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood can be an ominous, alien place. Way out in the southwestern end of the city, it’s a zone in flux. For years, it was the treacherous turf of crack dealers, ruffians and struggling artists, who holed up in the area’s once stately, now deteriorating homes. More recently, it has fallen prey to waves of gentrification, with shabby-chic nightclubs and cutesy cafés spilling over from the swank strip a few blocks east on Queen West.

But even today’s Parkdale can’t quite scrub off its history of grime. Wander west of Dufferin St. late at night and you’ll see working girls and rowdy drunks roaming outside the roti shops, multicultural convenience stores and discount designer fabric outlets. It’s a vibrant place, as magical as it is discombobulating. It’s those qualities that inspired Claudia Dey to seize on Parkdale as the setting for Stunt, her beautiful, surreal, slightly gothic debut novel.

Stunt is the story of Eugenia, a sensitive-but-tough preteen forced to grow up when her beloved father, a mad artist named Sheb Wooly Ledoux, vanishes in the middle of the night. Sheb leaves a note (“gone to save the world… sorry, yours, sheb wooly ledoux, asshole”), which inspires Eugenia’s Odyssean journey to find him. The young girl navigates her fantastical city, which spans the wilds of Toronto Island, the ghostly grounds of an inn on the Scarborough Bluffs and the mean streets of Parkdale, which in Dey’s hands bear strong echoes of Sweeney Todd and Alice In Wonderland.

With Stunt, Dey has earned comparisons to not only Mordecai Richler and Anne Carson, but Montreal wonder-girl Heather O’Neill, whose debut novel, Lullabies For Little Criminals, also features a young girl who struggles to stay connected with her itinerant father.

“I don’t know if we’re part of a zeitgeist,” Dey laughs sheepishly during a recent interview in a café just east of Parkdale, “because these stories almost feel like classic archetypes. [They come from the same place as] Twelfth Night, tales of tough women doing what they need to do to survive.”

Young Canadian writers like Dey and O’Neill (Dey jokingly dubs them “the grimy dozen”) are answering Northrop Frye’s archetypal CanLit question — “Where is here?” — by shining their flashlights into the seedier nooks and crannies of Canada’s urban centres and suburban wastelands. Young writers like Ibi Kaslik, Zoe Whittall and Emily Schultz are carving out a magical new geography of Canada that incorporates a love of poetry, an appreciation of industrial beauty and a strong commitment to teasing out issues of race and class.

Dey, who is also a respected playwright (Beaver, Trout Stanley) and advice columnist for the Globe and Mail, claims her creative writing is often sparked by a single striking image; frequently, that vision is imagined. In the case of Stunt, it was a daydream of a small girl in a nightgown, walking on a tightrope across Toronto’s bustling Kensington Market, where Dey was living when she conceived the novel. Dey kept the girl, but left the Kensington backdrop behind when she moved across the city and had a child of her own.

“Suddenly I was amongst the mansions, and the grassy space, and the prostitutes at the corner and the permanent garage sales of Parkdale,” she swoons. “I just thought, this is the richest neighbourhood imaginable to set this story in. [Eugenia’s] sensual engagement with the world is so heightened and diverse and strange, so I wanted the world to be heightened back.”

(Coach House Press)

Young Eugenia has synaesthesia, a condition in which individuals confuse senses — the colour red, for example, might taste like brandy, while a lilting melody might emit the aroma of violets. Eugenia’s experience is hallucinatory, reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon’s trippy descriptions of acid tests and sensory overload in The Crying of Lot 49. It’s a detail that works well with Dey’s voice, which spills over with curious metaphors and adjectives. In her version of magical realism, the sky is the colour of “wet newspapers,” girls “shake and stare [like] horny puppies” and beauty is “unsafe, [a] high note breaking the glass in your hand.”

Dey has an infatuation with the rhythms of language. She takes pains, however, to ground her fiction in concrete detail. In her play The Gwendolyn Poems (2002) — which was nominated for both the Governor General’s and Trillium awards — she wove together the tangible facts of poet Gwendolyn MacEwen’s tragic biography with her mystical work. In Stunt, Dey clings to a particular time — the year 1981.

“There are a lot of uncanny events in the book, and I wanted to contain them on a really discernable grid,” she explains. “Hopefully, it helps convince the reader that this is the world where we all live. Here are the dates, here are the times, here are the places; those recognizable parts are tethers. I felt like that just added a kind of counterpoint to the more magical elements.”

The year itself was initially arbitrary, Dey says. But certain symbols – Princess Diana’s marriage, for one — felt right. “I was a child of the ’70s, but there was something about the ’80s — like there was a moment where the world got corrupted.” Factor in the debut of MTV in 1981, and one could argue that it was the year popular culture contracted a collective case of ADHD. “I can’t get over what’s happened to us,” Dey sighs. “Our brains have become so fuzzy. It’s like the death of endurance.”

Because Stunt is set in locations that have undergone great transformations, the book feels almost archival. That sense is underscored by the themes of loss and mourning in the narrative, or what Dey calls the “process of alchemising grief.” Abandoned by her parents and alienated from her home, Eugenia struggles to re-establish her sense of identity.

“It’s unravelling this girl’s sense of ancestry,” Dey offers, “and then at the same time, it’s memorializing place. In 1981, these locations — Parkdale, Toronto Island, the Guild Inn — were very different. Today, they’re threatened in a way and evolving in a way as well, depending on how you see it. The Guild, along the Scarborough Bluffs, is essentially abandoned. It’s quite ghostly and elegant and grand. The building is there, it’s shuttered with boards, but during the day, it’s full of people scampering through the gardens — dogs and children; it’s really like walking through a ghost town.

“I’m always curious about this question of belonging,” Dey says. “I’m interested in how we can find ourselves when all the obvious markers that form our identity are gone. I’d never consciously aspire to [recreate national identity] within a book, because it’s such a worthy and scholarly thought. But I really appreciate the idea, and I think it’s so crucial that we do interact with the places in which we live. Canada’s still in its infancy, in a way, so there’s still space to make a mark.”

Stunt is in stores now. Claudia Dey will be appearing on Oct. 17 and Oct. 19 at WordFest, also known as the Calgary-Banff International Writers Festival.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.