de Nikolits, Lisa
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1966- ) South-African art director and author, in Canada from 2000, active in the latter capacity from around 2010. Her first novels were nonfantastic, with strong autobiographical threads. The Witchdoctor's Bones (2014) is a fantasy set in Africa, and The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist's Solution (2019) confabulates supernatural healings and what may be a sound critique of latterday capitalism. The protagonist of No Fury Like That (2017) is (it seems) dead, but the reader is allowed to surmise that she is in a Purgatory-like arena (see Zone) subject to a Godgame testing of her ability to grow up.
In The Rage Room (2022), which begins the Near Future Rage Room sequence, the protagonist's terrifying and inexplicable murder of his family on Christmas Eve in 2055, leads to his attempting through Time Travel backwards from the Dystopian AI-sanitized present to see if he can reverse the crime; his encounters with a Feminist group, attempting through their Eden Collective to redeem planet Earth, could plausibly lead to the extermination, faute de mieux, of Homo sapiens altogether, though this is surreally averted in the gonzo sequel, Everything You Dream Is Real (2022), set a decade or so further on, with Climate Change transforming the world, teams of Genetically Engineered operatives and fanatics attempting to make radical changes, and the protagonist of the previous tale fresh-born (as it were) out of something like a Virtual Reality Zone. [JC]
Lisa de Nikolits
born Johannesburg, South Africa: 1966
works (selected)
series
Rage Room
- The Rage Room (Toronto, Ontario: Inanna Publications, 2022) [Rage Room: pb/]
- Everything You Dream Is Real (Toronto, Ontario: Inanna Publications, 2022) [Rage Room: pb/]
individual titles
- The Witchdoctor's Bones (Toronto, Ontario: Inanna Publications, 2014) [pb/]
- No Fury Like That (Toronto, Ontario: Inanna Publications, 2017) [pb/]
- The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist's Solution (Toronto, Ontario: Inanna Publications, 2019) [pb/]
links
previous versions of this entry