When he leaves his place, Duncan has Wayne break into his home, where they go undetected by the Roach’s deaf grandmother.

Their hunch is confirmed when he shows up wearing the blue shirt and grey pants of a mall guard. The Roach stands six foot tall (about 1.8 metres) with a solid build, buzzcut hair, an acne-scarred face, and mud-brown eyes behind “glasses thick enough to distort his eyes.” From earlier savvy sleuthing, the boys have determined their quarry likely works as a security guard at the Yorkdale Shopping Centre. Duncan keeps the book and, after some false trails, finally puts a face to the man when the Roach, incredibly, seeks to retrieve the book at Duncan’s workplace. When Duncan tries to interest the police in the troubled diary, he is ignored. The boys have engaged in such petty crime as shoplifting. That terrible incident is revisited in dreams and in memory when he goes swimming in the neighbourhood pool. As a strong swimmer who was closest to her when she was in distress, Duncan feels responsible for her death. In his quest, he is also seeking redemption for a tragic event from the previous summer when he had been unable to rescue a drowning girl.

It also appears to be the diary of a disturbed man who has been stalking young women on the subway.Įnlisting his friends Wayne (“the muscle”) and Vinny (“the brains”), Duncan decides to pursue the psychopath. The journal includes troubling entries and newspaper clippings about animal killings and arsons. “The feel of the soft, worn leather makes me cringe - feels too much like skin,” Duncan, the narrator, says. One day, Duncan idly picks from a stack of books one with a brown leather cover with no title or writing on the spine. ( See also Toronto Subway.) The subterranean storage facility at the Bay Street subway station holds an odd assortment of items left behind on buses, subways and streetcars. His father works the overnight shift at a printing plant.ĭuncan reports daily to a dead-end summer job deep beneath the city in the lost and found office of the Toronto Transit Commission. His mother works part-time at Walmart while studying at community college. He describes Acceleration as “‘What I Did on my Summer Vacation’ meets Silence of the Lambs.” Plot Synopsisĭuncan lives in an apartment complex known as the Jungle, on the edge of an urban industrial wasteland in Toronto. He has worked in libraries, bookstores, a bookbinding factory and a lost and found office.

He grew up in a working-class neighbourhood similar to the one described in Acceleration. McNamee was born and raised in Toronto before moving to Vancouver. The publicity for Graham McNamee’s fourth book included a biography written in the terse style of an entry in a police blotter.

Acceleration by graham mcnamee