Sarah O'Connor

“‘I feel alone,” she says, ‘when I’m with other people.’

‘Ah,’ Ernest says. ‘The worst kind of lonesome,'” (Lockyer).

In the rural town of Burr, Ontario thirteen-year-old Jane’s dad has just died. She spends her time fantasizing about becoming a worm that will burrow into his body, buys tarot cards and tries Ouija boards to see if she can make contact. Her mother Meredith is unaware of what’s happening with Jane, acknowledges the disconnect but after finding a bed in the woods near her house and makes a home for herself and the ghost of her dead husband there. Meanwhile town recluse Ernest watches on, mourning the childhood death of his younger sister and is fascinated with Jane. When Jane and Ernest disappear together Meredith is spurred into action to find them while the town of Burr waits, watches, listens, and gossips.

I’ve long been fascinated with Southern Ontario Gothic. It’s a weird little subgenre that maybe exists, the verdict is still out there. But it’s fascinated me all the same. I was excited to learn about this book, my first official Southern Ontario Gothic. And I think Burr does a good job with the genre. The town itself has a great dark and Gothic feel, hints of Flannery O’Connor with the towns judgmental and protectiveness over who it deems theirs. Jane’s fascination with death also fits with the genre, as does her and Meredith’s, and Ernest as a Boo Radley adjacent character fits as well. Lockyer does an excellent job with the Gothic elements as well as linking everything together in the short chapters which are told from Jane, Meredith, Ernest, and Burr’s perspectives. Readers get an insight into the town and the characters that creates a web that’s beautiful to look at. I enjoyed the references to some real-like Southern Ontario Gothic like the Donnelly’s and it was nice to read about places I have been.

I enjoyed Lockyer’s writing and how she wrote about grief. Jane’s preoccupation with death is such a relatable one for a grieving child and I think Lockyer really understood the slow and changing horror that the death of a loved one causes an individual. It’s one of the most realistic looks at grief I’ve read in a while (though I did also read Pet Sematary recently, guess I’m on theme).

That being said, aside from a few mentions of Canadian landmarks of the nineties (the Skydome) there really isn’t much that marks it for it’s setting, which is a problem. Being a smalltown and Gothic, a lack of mention of technology and cellphones could easily be thought to be because of the smalltown setting, not that it’s set before a time those things were commonplace. It’s still a good book, but it really didn’t need to be set in the nineties. The same story could have been told set in modern day without it changing anything.

Burr was a great novel, short and atmospheric, I think it fits perfectly with the Southern Ontario Gothic, if such a thing exists. If it does, Burr should easily be added to the canon!

Publication: October 10th 2023
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Pages: 240 pages (eBook)
Source: Libby
Genre: Fiction, Gothic, Literary, Horror
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤.5
Summary:

A ’90s-era Southern Ontario Gothic about holding on to the dead, voiced with plaintive urgency and macabre sensuality. In the small town of Burr, Ontario, thirteen-year-old Jane yearns to reunite with her recently deceased father and fantasizes about tunnelling through the earth to his coffin. This leads her to bond with local eccentric Ernest, who is still reeling from the long-ago drowning of his little sister. Jane’s mother, Meredith, escapes into wildness, enacting the past on the abandoned bed that she finds in the middle of the forest, until her daughter’s disappearance spurs her into action. The voice of the town conveys the suspicions and subliminal fears of a rural community―a chorus of whispers that reaches a fever pitch when Jane and Ernest disappear from Burr together. Throughout, the novel is haunted by Henry, a former wrestler who once stood on his bed in the middle of the night, holding up the weight of the ceiling in his sleeping hands. Mixing realism and the fantastic, Brooke Lockyer’s debut novel investigates the nature of grief and longing that reach beyond the grave.