Kenneth J. Harvey, The Town that Forgot How to Breathe *** 1/2

This horror novel has literary pretensions, as evidenced by the blurbs from J.M. Coetzee and Joseph O'Conner instead of Stephen King and Peter Straub. Strange things are afoot in the Newfoundland fishing village of Bareneed. Residents are dying from an illness that makes them just stop breathing, and the bodies of former residents lost at sea are washing ashore. A man who has rented a house in Bareneed for the summer is inexplicably drawn to the widow across the street. People are mermaids, albino sharks, and other legendary sea creatures.

I was drawn to this book by the promise of Newfoundlander atmosphere and creeping dread. It mostly delivered on these counts, and Harvey creates intriguing metaphysics for the supernatural events. Two problems undermined the drama, though.

First, the town featured too many people with supernatural powers before the illness struck: three or four people who could see auras, two who made drawings that predicted the future, and one who communed with her dead family. The prevalence of such powers made the strange events seem like less of a break from normality, and provided overly convenient ways to figure out the mystery.

Second, the haunting of summer-visitor Joseph and his daughter was only tangentially related to the events striking the rest of the town, both in theme and mechanics. Rather than reinforcing each other, I felt like the two stories distracted from each other.