Readers tend to forgive memoir writers the indulgence of scripting their lives as coherent narratives connected by subtle transitions and dramatic plot points, but only so long as their stories are compelling. There is no end to the memoirs proliferating across the categories that describe human impulse, achievement, or perversion. How then to evaluate John Scott’s The Really Scary Gifts of Shiva?

It’s a memoir of sorts in that it concerns a personal storyline revealed through a series of seemingly chance-ridden, dream-like episodes. Scott, a highly acclaimed visual artist from Toronto, conceptualizes himself as the artist-freak-outsider, a marginal character out of a William Burroughs novel. From youth, Scott’s idol was Lon Chaney, the actor behind the monsters, and we get the impression that Scott is, for the most part, a walking, talking accident zone of improbable personal disaster. He gets hit by lightning – twice. He gets meningitis. He flails and fails in relationships. He harbours a terrorist. He crashes his motorcycle. And, yes, he is a survivor in the end.

Scott’s stories and drawings are entertainingly offbeat, and the editorial craft applied here elevates the material into something within the definition of progressive artistic expression, but also not likely to provide therapeutic closure in the way expected by the producers of The Oprah Winfrey Show. It’s a sweet little book that you root for, endearing and gentle by showing Scott to be – most of all – a human, insightful character, despite the studied way the more bizarre elements of his personality (and life) are played up.

The book corresponds nicely to a comment made in the afterword by Ann MacDonald, the Toronto writer and artist who ably assembled the book by recording and editing Scott’s stories, essentially performing the role of transcibing muse to his madness: “….the line between truth and fantasy doesn’t seem to matter so much: fiction and reality blend into one strange existence that makes as much sense as anything else in this world.”