Setting picturesque cottage country ablaze
With his latest novel, No Quarter, John Jantunen cranks up the heat in Ontario’s divided cottage country.
Deacon Riis is a young reporter in Tildon, a small town that prides itself as the Gateway to Summer, catering to wealthy tourists from Toronto whose exclusive summer homes dot the picturesque lakes and bays outside of town. Haunted by the traumatic loss of his family in a childhood car accident, Deacon bides his time with a lover two decades his senior and obsessively rereads the strange writings of George Cleary, the enigmatic father figure who raised him after the death of his parents. Deacon’s world is rattled when bizarre and violent events in and around town begin to mirror the cataclysmic happenings in George’s novels.
Reporting on these events for the town’s paper, Deacon finds himself caught in the middle of a spiralling escalation of violence.
Jantunen has an exceptional ability to render the familiar staples of cottage country off-kilter and sinister. The reader, like Deacon, is never sure who to trust. Rene Descartes, an ex-con with serious anger issues, is just one of the questionable characters to people Jantunen’s small-town world. Another is the narcissistic and attention-seeking son of a wealthy Toronto developer with a summer property near Tildon.
As Jantunen carefully mines class tensions in the community, a number of suspects in the crime spree emerge. Jantunen is adept at portraying the seething resentments of local residents whose livelihoods depend on their overbearing summer visitors. With Deacon Riis, the bumbling reporter, Jantunen con- structs a believable, if not especially charismatic protagonist — a young man with little ambition, whose intimate familiarity with George’s writings helps him connect the dots.
While the novel as a whole feels uneven, and could be streamlined in places, Jantunen’s ambition is praiseworthy. Pasting blocks of George’s sensational texts directly into the narrative, the author creates a “novel within a novel” that serves as both counterpoint and foil to the main action. While this back-andforth at times proves distracting, Jantunen’s reach delivers many genuine moments of suspense. And while the novel’s climax is telegraphed early on, there’s still pleasure to be had in Jantunen’s adrenalin-rushed, blistering descriptions as the wilderness around Tildon begins to blaze.
All in all, No Quarter is a solid read, particularly for those who enjoy their thrillers local.