Langley’s Ian Weir has created and written for some of the best known Canadian television shows of the last 15 years, including Arctic Air, Flashpoint and Edgemont.
He’s written plays for both the stage and for radio and, along the way, penned three young adult novels, a newspaper humour column and a libretto for an alternative rock opera based on the legend of Faust.
On April 25 the Clearbrook Library and The Reach Gallery Museum will co-host a reading by Weir from his 2009 novel, Daniel O’ Thunder.
It tells the story of a prizefighter’s attempt to defeat the devil.
Set in the 1850s in London, England, Daniel O’Thunder interweaves the voices of several narrators to tell the story of a troubled but charismatic prize-fighting evangelist who challenges none other than the Devil to a battle in the ring.
A former pugilist with a right fist known as “The Hammer of Heaven,” O’Thunder disappeared for years before resurfacing as a crusading street preacher.
He pursues a life in Christ, serving those in need, whether they be poor, homeless or in need of guidance. But on London’s dark streets, an evil presence is wreaking havoc and throwing into peril the lives of O’Thunder’s most vulnerable souls.
The novel inhabits the world of the theatre, the criminal underworld and the world of bare-knuckle prizefighting, then shifts to the wild west of North America, where O’Thunder meets his ultimate opponent in the desert of the B.C. Interior. Weir’s reading begins at the gallery, 32388 Veterans Way in Abbotsford, at 7 p.m. on April 25.
