By Cecilia Nasmith/Today’s Northumberland
Local author Shane Peacock’s new mystery As We Forgive Others explores a subgenre that takes the reader to unsuspected depths that lie beneath a deceptively smooth surface – Southern Ontario Gothic.
Classic Gothic literature is exemplified by the Frankenstein and Dracula novels, with their castles and scary settings. American Gothic updates the genre with gruesome stories like Fargo.
Southern Ontario Gothic is more like Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, Peacock said – “kind of about these nice, polite, often small-town societies that have all this darkness underneath.”
He is pleased to report a positive early response to As We Forgive Others, which is subtitled A Northern Gothic Mystery and written in the spirit of the Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy.
Peacock enjoyed the Larsson books as “a different kind of crime novel, but also I was really interested in the way in which Scandinavian crime novels kind of fit the Canadian personality.”
Which entails portraying the Canadian personality in a new light, he said.
“Traditionally, we are these really polite people and we are nice people, a hard-working people. And we are all these things. But we are also people with all kinds of secrets. We are certainly learning that,” he said in an interview a week after Orange Shirt Day.
“I think of our country as kind of an iceberg personality, more like Scandinavians. People used to set aside our Indigenous peoples and say we are a combination of American and British. I have always thought it was more of a Northern approach.
“We all present a certain way, and then there’s what we really are underneath.”
As We Forgive Others is the story of NYPD homicide detective Hugh Mercer, buckling under the horrors of the job, watching his marriage break down. When he finally loses control and assaults a suspect, he realizes he needs to get away. Thinking about where he can decompress, Mercer settles on “that country to the north, where people are happy and everybody is polite.
“In my novel, I never mention the name Canada. It’s a nameless country, a nameless place,” Peacock said.
“Where he goes is kind of like an amalgamation of places – a little bit of Cobourg, Millbrook, Bobcaygeon. There’s references to Canadian songs, like Bobcaygeon.
“He settles in the northern part of Southern Ontario and thinks he will be able to relax, and soon finds out these people are really strange, a lot of things going on underneath the surface.
“He starts a relationship with a woman, and she is like that – harbouring darker things.” For example, a good month goes by without this lady (Alice Morrow) ever mentioning she is actually a local police officer.
But that all lies ahead of him, as the book opens in this nameless northern community and a woman comes to his door to tell him a murder is about to happen.
“He thinks she’s crazy, sends her away. The next day, the crime happens. Then he is freaked out and starts to solve the crime with this woman he is in a relationship with. Then the twists and turns begin.”
Cormorant Books plans a Nov. 9 publication date, and a Nov. 5 launch is scheduled in Toronto. There is also a launch planned for Cobourg, which he hopes can be in a cafe because, in the book, the crime took place in a small cafe.
Now a Cobourg resident, Peacock comes from a Hope Township family.
“We go back many generations, as many as you can go and not be Indigenous.”
His father grew up on a farm in Elizabethville, which would later be the place where young Shane spent all his summers – though his year-round home was Kapuskasing (whose circular main street inspired the circular main street in the little community where Mercer sought refuge).
His writing career is quite varied, as he likes to do different things. The list includes Libris and Arthur Ellis Award winning children’s and young adults’ books – several of them grouped into series (The Boy Sherlock Holmes series, The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim trilogy, The Dylan Maples Adventures series, The Seven Series trilogy).
“I am known as a writer for young people, but a lot of the stuff I have written kind of has a grown-up feel – serious stuff. My last teen novel was The Book of Us, and it was getting pretty grown-up,” Peacock said.
“I like to say I’m an adult author dressed up in a young writer’ clothes.
“I have another young adult novel coming out in the spring, set in an imaginative US in 1899. And a sequel to As We Forgive Others will come out in about a year, A Place Of Secrets. As We Forgive Others is told from the man’s perspective – the second will be told from the woman’s perspective. Each new book will go back and forth.”
This will be his latest series – the Northern Gothic Mystery series.
“My first book The Great Farini was nonfiction. After that, there were my plays for Fourth Line Theatre and my journalism,” Peacock said.
“But all my novels so far have been for kids. This is my first novel for grown-ups, and I hope to do quite a few.”
