‘Evil history as old as the land’
Woodbine Grove
by Ryan O’Dowd
Hamilton: Manor House Press, 2025
$29.95 / 9781998938193
Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic
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Travel Advice and Advisories by Destination, a Government of Canada webpage (and the government’s “official source of travel information and advice”), has a simple, colour-coded system for prospective travellers. Turning to Finland or Fiji, for instance, a viewer will see a green circle with a white check mark in it—along with an accompanying message: “Take normal security precautions.” North Korea and South Sudan, meanwhile, are assigned circles—red, emblazoned with a white X—and a blunt assessment of the risk level: “Avoid all travel.”
What fun if the federal government’s purview extended to fictional locales!
The Vancouver of Sam Wiebe’s Wakeland novels, for instance, would definitely warrant a yellow circle with an exclamation point (“Exercise a high degree of caution”) or an orange one with a minus sign (“Avoid non-essential travel”), depending on the neighbourhood. For Wilhelm, a fictitious town on the Sunshine Coast, and the primary setting of Eddy Tan Boudel’s Giller Prize-shortlisted The Tiger and the Cosmonaut: either green or red, contingent on the traveller’s skin colour or sexuality. Eden Robinson’s northwest BC in Traplines, the Central Interior of John Vigna’s No Man’s Land, Northern BC of Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat, or the East Kootenay of W. K. Shephard’s A Canadian Werewolf in Montana? “Avoid all travel,” during a rough patch, “Exercise a high degree of caution” otherwise.
Then there’s Woodbine Grove, a shadowy, miserable backwater somewhere in BC’s Lower Mainland that practically drips with corruption. BC travellers making an impulsive turn north by Nicomen Slough or a wrong turn on Hemlock Valley Road (or myriad other spots, really: there’s no shortage of dank and foreboding evergreen locations in the Fraser Valley) might find themselves in a sister town to Stephen King’s Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine or Andrew Pyper’s Murdoch, Ontario in The Lost Girls. “Exercise a high degree of caution”? Uh-huh, definitely.
Woodbine Grove’s a haunted sort of place and—dead or alive—the apparitions seem both restless and vengeful.
Though overflowing with “socially contracted niceties and polite smiles,” the town nevertheless simmers with bone-deep resentments. The locals are a handful. The mayor is equally ambitious and bonkers; the apathy of the police (“Woodbine Grove’s finest spoke exclusively in platitudes”) belies police malevolence, and up the road in a lone mansion there’s a retired scientist whose name may as well be Dr. Moreau. Further, there’s longstanding bitterness between some white townie citizens and First Nations folk in the nearby reserve that seems to stretch back to the nineteenth century; and race relations appear to be getting worse. The third-person narrator refers to the Bloodletting Beneath the Morning Star, “one of the worst massacres in the region’s history.” Evidently, this pocket of the Lower Mainland is particularly blood-soaked.
Debut novelist Ryan O’Dowd opens Woodbine Grove with a prologue where atmosphere is cranked up to maximum. In the municipality’s nearby Whitesand area, defined by “[b]roken homes with rain-sagged ceilings,” where “[r]ez dogs howled hymns of misery for the dying day,” young aboriginal activist Ignacio Lahari observes his “wasteland” surroundings—“bloody twilight sky,” dusk that grows “bitter, withering flowers and condemning crops,” and cold that arrives “early … like a bad party guest”—and feels “unspeakably afraid.” He’s right to, as five pages later his heart has ceased to beat.
When the first chapter starts with “They buried Neil Reinhardt on Labour Day weekend…,” and later mentions in passing Scooby-Doo’s Mystery Machine, O’Dowd signals where readers will be heading: there’s a mystery afoot, and while the ensuing investigation might solve it, investigators will face danger, especially as they peer beyond those “socially contracted niceties and polite smiles” that reveal so little and disguise so much.
High school acquaintances Ruby Sinclair and Alinta Laghari command attention in that chapter, in shock and conversing following the apparent suicide of Neil, Ruby’s boyfriend, and death (unbeknownst to them) of Ignacio, Alinta’s elder brother.
In keeping with a phenomenon that’s common in mystery fiction and virtually unknown in real life—that is, intrepid teenagers who play detective and investigate gruesome deaths—Ruby and Alinta band together. Step by step—also: misstep by misstep—they quip sarcastically and squabble about which one has the greater right to complain about their desultory lot in life. The friendship between them is a delicate new growth that could succumb with the least breeze.
They’re lonely, angry, and sad, and they’re happy to rail against the falsity of the status quo. O’Dowd’s characterization of them shows real panache. Though my daily routine exposes me to no teenagers whatsoever, and therefore my assessment is based on TV series I’ve watched that star investigative teens (the scripts of which are not written by actual adolescents, of course), this duo struck me as both true to life and likeable. They balance all their heartfelt angst and sentiments about unfairness with DIY coping strategies: rebuffing the efforts of inquisitive authority figures, fantasizing about escape, making regrettable fashion choices, rolling their eyes, smoking marijuana.
The girls’ pluckily intuitive investigation takes them beyond the “town-wide masquerade,” past school (where, in her conservative uniform, Ruby “might’ve been an Amish runway model”), assisted by some, resisted by others. Along the way, O’Dowd unfurls a plot that’s gripping—yes, in a kind of gonzo Canadian gothic way—and, always, anchored by the appealing friendship and detection efforts of Ruby and Alinta.
It’s O’Dowd’s enthusiasm, perhaps, that leads him to ‘an everything but the kitchen sink’ approach that threatens to overburden the story and hinder the pace. Flashback passages in italics, for example. And too many characters with too much history (their number includes Leopold Montgomery, “Woodbine Grove’s alternative-fact shock jock,” Elder Kajika, afflicted “with the same sun-damaged skin and weariness about the eyes as those in the streets of Whitesand,” former pro wrestler Mayor ‘Rottweiler’ Rotello, and Dr Angel Valdis, he of the lisp, “odd spider-creep,” and “inquisitive bug eyes”).
And O’Dowd’s fondness for descriptive writing sometimes competes with the genre’s need for a mile-a-minute plot. Now and then, the novel is both made bulky and sluggish by sentences like this one: “The splintered tarmac to Whitesand was like many desolate highways throughout the Lower Mainland, cutting through monochromatic bleach-brown lowlands beneath a solemn gray sky.”
Possibly as well, there’s too much mystery. Readers learn of an “ancient horror” and “old beast” that may or may not be a Wendigo; and as the town’s Haunted Harvest Festival approaches, Woodbine Grove is revealed as a UFO hotspot and subject to a Yowie [Tribe] Curse. Plus, the town is said to exist “on the borderland, between our world and the Other.” And what’s with with abandoned church spray-painted with “GOD IS DEAD,” and prison-like Hope Spring Eternal old folks’ home that’s adjacent to Serpenttongue Valley?
Mae West said, “Too much of a good thing is a wonderful,” and that was part of her schtick. For me, the dedication and perseverance of two plucky small town teenagers named Ruby and Alinta was a good thing and more than enough.
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Whenever he finishes it, Cull will be Brett Josef Grubisic‘s sixth novel. He assigns, edits, and posts fiction, poetry, and children’s lit reviews for BCR; occasionally, he contributes reviews as well. [He’s recently written about books by Michael V. Smith, David Bouchard, Alice Turski, Louise Sidley, K.J. Denny (ed.), Sonali Zohra, Carrie Anne Vanderhoop, Kristen Pendreigh, Sam Wiebe, Maureen Young, Daniel Anctil, and Adam Welch for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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