Manitoban Mysteries

As a new kid in elementary school in southeast Calgary in the early 1970s, I was assured by classmates that an old brick building just south of town had once been a house of horrors, complete with torture chambers in the attic. (I later learned it had been a home for orphans, the poor, and the aged, established by the nineteenth-century missionary Albert Lacombe.) Judging by the whispered tales of terror, hints of the supernatural, and eerie trappings of decayed buildings and family curses running through Brief Life, Kevin Marc Fournier likely spent part of his youth listening wide-eyed to similar legends. And as a Winnipegger, he probably heard the local tales of ghostly nocturnal presences at St. Andrew’s on the Red, a stone church north of the city.

In his first adult novel, Fournier brings a gothic sensibility to a familiar Manitoba setting. Brief Life is set in the...