Though she regrets that the “drawback to comic writing is that people don’t always take you seriously,” she can’t deny her affinity for comedy and eccentric plots. “It was boring and bourgeois,” she explains, “I thought ‘So what? What’s the big deal, I’m rewriting something I’ve read 17 times before.’ There was nothing to add.” The lively, eccentric and metropolitan current version came as a result of Mayr’s reaching a creative cul de sac. Over the past six years, Mayr says, the novel has changed radically: it began as a completely realistic tale of a high school reunion cast with heterosexual characters. While the characters are a composite of real life and untrammelled imagination, they’re also a reflection of years of writing and revising. “I’m fascinated by rule-breakers and with lawlessness,” the 36-year-old author states when probed about the origin of her novel’s hypnotic pageant of oddities-which includes Lai Fun’s cannibal mother Louve, dolorous lesbian sister Angelique, workaholic wife Jennifer Singh, frazzled best friend Stefanja Dumanowski (whose husband, Thor, she routinely beds), dead high school pal Kim Shisamoto and undead teacher Mrs Blake.

She’s had no run-ins with cannibalism, apparitions or vampires, either. What’s more, her time in high school was not the nightmare Lai Fun endured, and she has no direct experience with school reunions (“Although I went to a friend’s reunion to research the book and pretended to be his ex-wife.”) Nor is the self-described “quiet, unassuming and polite” writer pregnant, married (if only because it is illegal in her home province) or vegan (“I eat a lot of meat I’m from Alberta!” she says). Yet unlike Lai Fun, Mayr was not named after a noodle. Mayr is also biracial and the child of parents who immigrated to Canada during the Trudeau era (though she’s no hormone-crazed adulterer with axes to grind). Like Lai Fun Kugelheim, the sour, foul-mouthed and supremely irritated protagonist of Venous Hum, Mayr has stores of knowledge about suburban Calgary.

Speaking to Mayr in Calgary, where she was born and now teaches at the University of Calgary, it becomes clear that there’s intermittent overlap between her facts and her fiction. All this mayhem, incidentally, takes place in Calgary, a city normally associated with rodeos and the oil sector.

Venous hum suzette mayr