Bit by Bit

Think of any major novel from the nineteenth century and there’s a decent chance it first appeared as a serial in a newspaper or magazine. But by the end of the twentieth century, radio and television — along with the increased affordability of paperbacks — had made the widely popular form all but obsolete.

Then, in the spring of 2023, the editor-in-chief of the Montreal Gazette, Bert Archer, asked Heather O’Neill if she wanted to develop a serialized story in the paper’s pages. “I thought it was a terrible idea,” she recalls, “one that might drive me mad, but I said yes immediately.” The result, originally titled Mystery in the Métro, ran every Saturday from May to December, alongside illustrations by the novelist’s daughter, Arizona O’Neill. The thirty chapters have now been gathered, with no editorial changes, into Valentine in Montreal.

O’Neill hails the Victorian serial, particularly the work of Charles Dickens, as an influence on her project: “He brought readers scenes from the underclasses, giving them the dignity of the rich.” The imprint of Dickens is captured in the childhood of O’Neill’s protagonist. Orphaned as a baby, Valentine was raised by her grandmother, a hoarder “of all things made of paper,” who forbade her to venture outside. We meet twenty-year-old Valentine shortly after her guardian’s death. She lives alone in a tiny apartment within a towering high-rise and works at a subterranean depanneur inside one of the city’s busiest metro stations, Berri-UQAM. Although she has never travelled beyond the city limits, she finds freedom in the metro system, which she rides as both a hobby and a ritual. Each of the chapters focuses on one of the network’s stations.

What Valentine lacks in worldly experience she more than makes up for in curiosity and imagination. Despite her reclusive childhood, she maintains an enchanted relationship with the world around her. As she explains to one of her colleagues, “I think that because I am underneath people’s feet underground all day, it makes me part of their subconscious. I am making up all the dreams people will have at night.” Feeling a duty to craft “pleasant dreams,” she envisions a train full of cats dressed as commuters and belugas swimming outside the windows. At the same time, Valentine has clear-eyed, almost anthropological insight into her surroundings. “When a girl weeps on the métro, everyone pretends not to see it,” she observes. “This is because there are very few places where a girl can cry without everyone around her asking why she thinks she has the right to feel that way.” Although she struggles to regard the “pensées” she jots down as art, Valentine nonetheless heeds the advice of another Victorian writer, Henry James, to “try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.”

During one of her shifts, Valentine spots her doppelgänger and follows her onto the street. She soon learns that her look-alike, Yelena, is a celebrated ballerina and, much to her surprise, her second cousin. To further complicate matters, Yelena has racked up serious gambling debts, which, because of the uncanny resemblance of the two women, Valentine quickly gets roped into helping her settle. The ensuing escapade — complete with Russian mobsters, a cricket that plays Eastern European folk music, and romantic intrigue — takes the young cashier far beyond what she could have imagined.

O’Neill’s deep familiarity with the quirks of Montreal life is evident on every page, as she documents the endless construction on city streets, the punishing rush of arctic wind through swinging station doors, and the “seedy-looking” mannequins posed in shop windows along Plaza St‑Hubert. Narrated by Valentine in the present tense, it is a riveting and fantastical tale, made all the more charming by her strange and surreal perspective.

Evidence of the book’s origins as a feature in the Gazette can be found throughout. Each chapter is roughly the same length, giving the story a rhythmic quality that is driven forward by a propulsive plot. Character descriptions and biographies are sometimes repeated, ostensibly for the sake of those who are joining midway through its run. The author of a serial must also strive to maintain the reader’s interest — lest she lose them from one instalment to the next — and O’Neill does so with many gripping cliffhangers and surreal detours. “I had to have a world that was fun to be in,” she explains. “I could not go back and change anything, as a writer usually does in a novel. Once a donkey danced into the book, there was no way to tell it to go.” While Valentine in Montreal bears signs of these formal constraints and oddities, it seldom feels gimmicky or contrived.

Marcus Kliewer’s serial novel, We Used to Live Here, developed organically. It began when the author, an illustrator from Vancouver, joined Reddit in 2020 and started posting excerpts of his fiction. He found success on r/nosleep, a subreddit dedicated to horror writing with over eighteen million followers. Kliewer’s second contribution to the forum, the four-part “We Used to Live Here,” was an instant hit: “OH MY GOODNESS. So creepy!” said one user in response to the opening part. “This whole story makes me feel dreadful in the best way,” wrote another about the conclusion. It was later voted the community’s “Scariest Story of 2021.” The waves it made online earned Kliewer both a three-book contract and a movie deal with Netflix.

Significantly expanded from the original version, We Used to Live Here follows Eve and Charlie, a queer couple who have recently relocated to the backcountry of Oregon to flip houses. Their recent acquisition, 3709 Heritage Lane, is dilapidated and isolated, and it has an all too spacious attic and basement. One early winter evening, Eve hears a knock on the door while she is home alone. She answers to find a family of five on the doorstep. The father, Thomas Faust — whose name alludes to deals brokered with the devil — explains that he grew up there and would like to give his children a tour. Eve, sensing something is amiss, resists at first. However, her “crippling fear of disappointing anyone, even complete strangers,” wins out, and she lets them inside.

Following a few eerie exchanges, Eve begins to grow suspicious. Although “the distant alarm bells of her subconscious rang out,” her fear goes unnoticed by the more gregarious Charlie, who returns in time to invite the family to stay for dinner and, after a sudden snowstorm closes the nearby bridge, for the night. When Eve awakes the next morning to discover Charlie gone and her own phone missing, she treks out to enlist the help of a neighbour, Heather. Over a cup of tea, Eve learns Thomas’s family adopted a runaway during his childhood. Heather tells her that, after a short time with the family, the troubled girl began to develop the delusional belief that “the house was changing, people were changing”— a paranoia that led her to stab eight-year-old Thomas with a fountain pen thirty-seven times. The strange and unnerving situation continues to escalate. Eve, fearing that she, too, is going mad, winds up at a mental institution, fighting the revelation that she may have been Thomas’s sister all along.

Kliewer draws on many tropes of the horror genre: menacing children’s toys, sinister motels, loss of control, and macabre hospital scenes. With an eye for unsettling details, he captures grotesque sights, sounds, and smells, like “the maggoty stench of decay.” Kliewer inserts ominous material between chapters: police reports, real estate records, and medical articles. One entry describes tattoo removal: “Even after years of treatment, a faint imprint is often visible.” It is not always obvious how these documents pertain to the plot at hand, but they intensify the overall tone of dread.

The withholding nature of serialization is especially apt for a work of horror like We Used to Live Here. The sense of suspense, suspicion, and fear of the unknown comes to be shared by the characters and the readers alike. At the same time, Kliewer has used the resources of his medium to foster a relationship with his audience. As he wrote, he hosted live question and answer sessions on Reddit and encouraged fans to “keep an eye out for connections”— a sensible tip considering the many hidden links woven throughout the story. While contemporary readers may no longer start “rioting because they wanted the next installment,” as O’Neill writes of Dickens’s work, they may still find ways to plead with — and influence — writers in mid‑process.