Sunshine Tales of a Sketchy Little Town

Tom Wayman’s short story collection, with its beautiful title, is set in the spectacular Slocan Valley of British Columbia. Yet in The Shadows We Mistake for Love, what interests Wayman is less the landscape than the people who live in its shadow, the citizens of a community strung out along creeks and rivers and logging roads, up the mountain, along the highway, and gathered into 21st century frontier settlements, their personal-use “grow shows” catching the sun in big rented windows.

This is Wayman’s second story collection. The first, Boundary Country, published in 2007, roamed from the Slocan Valley to Toronto to the Civil War–era United States. The stories in his latest focus on the valley, where Wayman has lived since 1989. They are loosely connected, with the occasional character appearing repeatedly, letting us follow his erratic and sometimes violent progress through life—and it is usually he. Yet even when there is no obvious...