Burgess served three months in this security facility for robbing a convenience store with a friend while wearing one of his mother's blouses, inspired after watching A Clockwork Orange and Straight Time.
In 1998, Burgess and his wife, Rachel Jones, moved from their flat in Toronto's Parkdale neighbourhood to a "shack by the river" in Wasaga Beach, Ontario.
This is a collection of sixteen short stories, featuring such things as insane doctors, supernatural dogs, dead men, and a real ninja turtle, all within the small Ontario town of Bewdley.
In this novel, an outbreak of a strange plague, AMPS (Acquired Metastructural Pediculosis), causes people across Ontario to slip into aphasia and then into a cannibalistic zombie rage.
This metaphysical, deconstructionist virus requires a multi-disciplinary approach and doctors, semioticians, linguists, anthropologists, and even art critics present theories as to its source and treatment.
The narrator is modelled after John List, a New Jersey man who killed his wife, mother and three kids and successfully eluded arrest for almost 18 years (when he was captured he was living under the name "Bob Clark").
Burgess has described the novel as, "an intimate first-person account of someone who realizes that he must kill others in order to keep his own disintegration at bay and his frantic attempts to rescue secondary versions of himself where this is not true and make them primary.
With this information, Idaho locks the author in a closet and runs off, armed with the knowledge that the entire world is invented and that he now has the power to imagine it differently.
When the author emerges from the closet and discovers that Idaho has made a mess of the novel, he sets out to find a cure to the story and bring its heart and mind together.
In this novel there are allusions to classic children's fare, ranging from The Neverending Story to the Choose Your Own Adventure series – tales that play with the idea of readers and characters controlling the narrative.
After a number of failed experiments at disposal, officials hit on the solution to the problem of aimless, lifeless wanderers clogging the streets: send the dead into orbit.
However, the celestial corpses begin to affect the Earth's sunlight, resulting in "Syndrome" – a blend of paranoia, depression, and hypochondria that turns the living into monsters of a different sort.
Burgess wrote out a script for Pontypool in 48 hours, his approach inspired by Orson Welles' radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds.
[11] Burgess has also been a singer with the rock band Lucy Jinx (formally known as Left by Snakes), alongside guitarist Chuck Baker.
[13] Burgess often sets his work in the towns and villages of rural Southern Ontario, including Bewdley, Pontypool, Collingwood and Cashtown Corners.
"[6] Burgess has said that the writers that he read as a teenager, such as Alfred Jarry, Comte de Lautréamont, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Genet, Alain Robbe-Grillet and André Gide made the biggest impression on him.
[6] He also enjoys Shirley by Charlotte Brontë "because it starts out so stable then distorts in mysterious ways ... characters vaporize and duplicate, dog bites infect out of the dark, people slip into narcotic winters.