NEWS RELEASE
DAVID JULIAN WIGHTMAN
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Apocalypse Chow is a parody retelling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, served with generous portions of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
In this parody, chef Walter E Kurtz, Canada's 'greatest chef,' is at the helm of Chow, an extreme destination dining restaurant in the wilds of northern Ontario.
Kurtz is brilliant and talented in every way... but he’s gone rogue, and possibly insane.
Veteran restaurant manager and hired gun, Charlie Marlow, is deployed by the Brothers, the illustrious owners of Chow, to venture into the hinterlands and confront their erstwhile star chef.
Marlow is instructed to fire Chef Kurtz with extreme prejudice. But can he follow through with his mission, or will “the hunger” consume them both?
In the ultimate showdown of authority versus anarchy, who will triumph?
Apocalypse Chow is a parody of our modern food and consumer culture, neatly packaged into a highly consumable literary product. Apocalypse Chow is also a celebration of the often-neglected wild foods found locally in Ontario and across Canada.
Whether or not the reader is wholly familiar with the source material, Apocalypse Chow is a satisfying adventure into the “heart of an impenetrable restaurant.”
The book is written by David Julian Wightman, whose mother’s family emigrated from Holland to Canada and settled in Orillia in the late 1950s.
His late grandfather, Cornelius Dettmers, owned an engineering firm in the city for many years, and his mother, Marianne Wightman (nee Dettmers), was a cub reporter at The Packet & Times in the 1960s.
Wightman spent many happy summers by Lake Couchiching as a child, and continues to visit his family in Orillia as often as he can.
Wightman put himself through Ryerson journalism school by bartending and waiting tables in Toronto restaurants, which served as the inspiration for Apocalypse Chow. He has since worked as a journalist and communications consultant on four continents, as well as serving, managing or consulting for restaurants in Canada, Australia, and southern Africa.
He currently lives in Ottawa and is in the editing stage of his first full-length novel.
Apocalypse Chow, his first self-published work of fiction, is available as a free download at iamdavidjw.com The paperback can also be purchased for $14,99 through the same website and, next month, will be available on Amazon.
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