Two takes, different worlds

Anvil $18.00 Reviewed by Karl Jirgens Tom Osborne's Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit begins with a film-noir style, moves to a rocking rhythm midway, then gallops madly while a hapless, lonely, Hank Pazik knocked senseless by a mattress tossed by party animals from a hotel balcony finds himself kidnapped by desperados who botch a robbery at Vancouver's Hyatt Regency during the historic Grey Cup game between the Argos and Stampeders. After flashbacks and cross-references between operatic form and literary structure, over-determinations of language, Hunter S. Thompson stylistics, and allusions to the muses, Hank is delivered safely home but not before extra-terrestrials carve the Nazca lines, an agoraphobic gunman with a Mossbert "Slugster" slide-action is blown to pieces, inebriated football fanatics shout synonyms for "penis" from hotel balconies, and opera singers performing La Traviata are transformed by the mind-bending effects of tackle-boxes of drugs purveyed by paranoid schizophrenics.