Smoke & Mayors: A MESSTERPIECE (THE MESSTERPIECE CYCLE)

By James Marc Ellis

SMOKE & MAYORS
A JAMES MARC ELLIS MESSTERPIECE

Born of chaos. Written in defiance.

Toronto beneath a haze of lust, power, and political theatre. The CN Tower doesn't just light up the skyline - it smolders, its needle dissolving into vapor that drifts across Lake Ontario like a confession too ashamed to hit the air.
In this fever-dream excavation of the Rob Ford era, a young gay speechwriter dives into the subconscious wreckage of a city that crowned a man it barely understood. What begins as a job becomes a seduction. What looks like loyalty becomes addiction. What sounds like public service becomes a script written in smoke.

The mayor is a contradiction in human form, torn between bravado and despair. The speechwriter is the unseen author of every miracle the city believes. Together, they spiral into a dangerous intimacy, each enabling the other's illusions until the truth bursts through the fa ade like a siren in the dark.

Told through a fractured, hallucinatory lens - where the CN Tower becomes a crackpipe and the city's skyline shimmers with guilt - SMOKE & MAYORS is part political noir, part queer myth, part psychological opera. It exposes a Toronto that prefers spectacle over salvation and a protagonist who finally chooses to burn down the lies he once built.
A story of power, obsession, downfall, and rebirth -
because some cities don't breathe air
they breathe scandal.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1069878618
• ISBN13: 9781069878618
• Release Date: December 2025
• Publisher: Messterpiece Works
• Length: 147 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.4" x 6.0"