The Herald for March 12 carried the headline : TEMP. I was living in room 28 of the Haliburton House Inn on Morris Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia. The room had light only from the coals in the fireplace and the streetlamp outside the window. It occurred to me that hidden deep inside my sense of the world in perfect order was the fear that the worst was on its way. It was four o'clock in the morning, March 13, 1927. In the four-poster bed, my employer's wife, Kala Murie, lying beside me, the world seemed in perfect order. In the months that follow, shuttling between Vienna’s makeshift darkroom and Kala Murie’s bed, Peter is drawn more and more deeply to Kala, as he comes to share her obsession with “spirit pictures,” photographs in which the faces of the dead, deeply missed or altogether forgotten, mysteriously appear during the process of development. Radin Heur - theirs is a macabre duet of violence and art.Īfter a strenuous journey, Peter arrives in Churchill on the very night of his employer’s wedding - only to be seduced by Vienna’s brilliant and beautiful new wife, Kala Murie. Across Canada, Linn has been arranging and photographing “gruesome accidents” for the private collection, in London, of a Mr. When young Peter Duvett accepts a job as an assistant to the esteemed portraitist Vienna Linn, in the remote town of Churchill, Manitoba, his life changes in more ways than he could possibly have imagined. The final book in Howard Norman’s Canadian trilogy is a tremendous accomplishment: a novel about spirit photographs, adultery and greed that moves from Halifax to the Far North and back again.

The Haunting of L by Howard Norman