In overview, Kenneth Harvey’s first American publication (following thirteen books in Canada) seems pure horror. A cranky and ingrown community named Bareneed suffers visitations from the dead, the corpses fresh even when centuries old, bobbing up out of the Newfoundland codfish lanes that used to provide the town’s income.

But then the eerie bleeds into the surreal as locals literally forget how to breathe. A few die, while others wind up on respirators, their eyes black and vacant. Authorities are mystified.

The trouble began when the cod fishery closed down a few years earlier and the community lost a piece of its soul, developing a need—a bare need—for “visions… manifested as a… coping mechanism.” But the secondhand vitality of conjuring spirits, in this town, must compete with the canned visions of the twenty-first century, the electronic storytelling of TV and the internet. Thus Harvey’s drama comes to embody a classic theme, the search for a locus of spirit in a world dominated by the machine. In this way, Town achieves more than hair-raising thrills.

To read the rest of this piece, please purchase this issue of the Believer online or at your local bookseller.

—John Domini