Criminal Intents

If Montreal has Michel Tremblay as its chief chronicler and southern Ontario is the scene of a turf war between Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, the most famous writer from Quebec’s Eastern Townships is undoubtedly Louise Penny. Her Chief Inspector Gamache series is on its twenty-first instalment, as people in the fictional town of Three Pines just keep being murdered. Penny tops bestseller lists even when she’s not co-writing with Hillary Clinton, and she’s won nine Agathas, the top prize for thrillers. Yet for all her accomplishments, her books are easier to find in shopping malls than on syllabuses. The division between “genre” and “literary” fiction keeps her out of the prestige market.

Are such categorizations justified or simple snobbery? The question seems particularly relevant as two of Quebec’s traditionally literary writers release novels that flirt with popular forms. Daniel Grenier’s Pour un paquet de Player’s (For a pack of Player’s) is a quick riff on Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, set in an idyllic community filled with suspiciously chummy men. Alexie Morin’s La Maison du rang Lynch (The house on Lynch Trail) sees children and teenagers confront the supernatural in the woods near Wickford Mills, a fictionalized take on the author’s hometown of Windsor, Quebec. Both writers have highbrow credentials: Grenier netted the Prix littéraire des collégiens for his magic realist debut, L’Année la plus longue (The Longest Year), and Morin picked up the Prix des libraires du Québec for Ouvrir son coeur (To open one’s heart) in 2019. And both, like Penny, place their creations in the Eastern Townships, as though the historic villages in the hills between Montreal and Sherbrooke were inherently spooky.

Pour un paquet de Player’s represents a departure for Grenier. Where his last novel was a sprawling rewrite of Ernesto Sabato’s On Heroes and Tombs, this latest entry, at less than 150 pages, is streamlined and snappy. The narrative follows Grégoire as he moves into a small community near Sherbrooke just as his partner, Murielle, is about to give birth. (Grenier fans will notice that Grégoire’s sister disappeared in the Yukon as a teenager, a nod to the protagonist of an earlier book.) Grégoire revels in the fraternity he finds among the local men, such that a handshake in a parking lot becomes “a form of alliance,” even as his relationship with Murielle begins to fray. The town’s name, Stepford, is a surefire sign that a twist is coming: the 1972 satirical novel featured husbands who systematically murdered their career-oriented wives to replace them with robots. Grenier doesn’t go quite that far, and what starts off as an allegory about gender relations mutates into something more nuanced. How do we negotiate the friction between individual happiness and interpersonal obligation? Is it brave to embrace the “absolute quest for liberty” or “a very selfish stance”? Grenier plants these thematic seeds alongside hints that Grégoire’s neighbours just might be plotting to kill his family.

In an interview with Le Devoir, Grenier explained that he sought to channel the pacing of an Edgar Allan Poe story. By contrast, Morin’s major intertext is Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Labelled the first volume in the Wickford Mills cycle, La Maison du rang Lynch sets up a gothic drama where tragedies repeat between generations and the environment weighs heavily on the psyche. The five families of the McCabe clan live clustered off a rural road, leaving one guest to observe, “It’s bizarre that your houses are so close while you’re also so far from everything.” The main protagonist is Vincent, a teen still troubled by the death of his brother, Samuel, who drowned in a creek at the age of three. A generation earlier, the woods had claimed another child: nine-year-old Anne Claire disappeared into them after being viciously beaten by Vincent’s grandfather. Her ghost might linger in the hills. These supernatural elements coexist with a more realistic exploration of family dynamics. Vincent’s aunt Marylou thus evaluates her situation after giving birth at fifteen: her mother at once expects her to “take care of every baby in the world” and treats her as “a child like the others, without freedom, without power.”

Even as Grenier unravels a community-wide conspiracy and Morin works a haunted cabin into the mix, a gulf separates their work from Penny’s crowd-pleasing fare. One might point to the prose: Penny’s fast-paced scenes are driven by dialogue, where Grenier and Morin tend toward abstract narration that plumbs their characters’ interiority. They also favour a certain ambiguity of characterization. Grégoire is sort of the good guy, but he’s also pathetic, the swings in his first-person narration showing his eagerness to please alongside a penchant for denial and paranoia. Likewise, La Maison du rang Lynch is lacking in villains, with the exception of an abusive grandfather who, in most of the novel’s sections, is already dead.

The largest distinction can be inferred from Morin’s foray into metafiction. While his relatives party, twentysomething Tommy struggles to analyze a short story about a man stranded in the middle of a river. His anchor won’t come up, so he spends one terrifying night alone on the boat surrounded by fog. The scene is rich in atmosphere, ripe with symbolism: “The water underneath, it’s death, it’s what he has on the inside, the part of himself that he doesn’t know.” But when he is rescued by fishermen the next day, the men discover the anchor has snagged on an old woman’s cadaver. “I would have found it more beautiful if there had been no corpse,” Tommy observes.

The scene explains the slow burn of Morin’s own tale, yet it also gestures toward a broader truth. Perhaps the key difference between literary and genre fiction is in their corpse-to-meaning ratio or, to put it more directly, how much they rely on plot. Inspector Gamache thrillers feature one twist after another, with body counts that would leave any ordinary soul traumatized and put any real town at the centre of a media frenzy. For all their borrowed tropes, Grenier and Morin still give events room to breathe. Far less happens, because the authors are concerned with motives and repercussions, thematic implications, the feeling and the meaning of it all. Even in the Eastern Townships, there isn’t room for so many bodies once you let all that human mess into the frame.