Quite the Catch

Based on the marketing copy on the back cover of Nicholas Herring’s debut novel, readers might expect a story like Michael Crummey’s Galore : a lush, disconcerting, and disorienting narrative of magic realism with a distinctly Atlantic Canadian flavour (of the early Newfoundland cod fishery in Crummey’s case, and of the contemporary Prince Edward Island lobster fishery in Herring’s). But Some Hellish is nothing of the sort. It is a work of immediate, tactile realism, wrapped around a single hard kernel of fantasy.

The central event of the novel — the inexplicable survival of a middle-aged lobster fisher, lost overboard while out of his mind on LSD and rescued hale and hearty after eight days — is bookended by convincing depictions of life in a small fishing community. From the stench of diesel fumes belching out of a Cummins engine, to the whine of an angle grinder...