I've been proven wrong. It is apparent to me now that the book really is dead. Although a few hundred people spent a lovely evening in the park listening to readings, more T-shirts seem to have been sold than books. Surely this is a sign that all hope is gone.

In all seriousness the event was a complete success, one which I watched between my volunteering duties. I got to watch a bit of each set, enjoying a poem about tampons, a tale of a french woman with a perfect complexion being married into a Hindu family, an airplane flight and a conversation between a girl and each of her dead parents. I didn't get to hear the explanation as to why one reading duo included a stripping Ryan Kamstra and a police man in short shorts providing shade from the moonlight with an umbrella. I must have been selling T-shirts at the beginning of that act and watching the barren book table.

I myself picked up a copy of the Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper and The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark as Remembered by Fourteen People in a Basement. For anyone else who picked up the chapbook, my single addition to the work was the line about the "undiscovered country". For me, the rest of the story went down the memory hole.

What else can I say? There must be some real literature lovers still surviving to have braved the mosquitoes to listen to some good poetry and prose. Another year of the Scream Literature Fest has come and gone, and a little bit of life has been pumped back into the book.