There’s that two-story brick building downtown on the corner—where family members bought my Great Aunt wedding gifts when she was a young married woman, where my mother bought her schoolbooks in grade thirteen, where I admired the Hummel figurines when I was a girl.

Over the decades, both name and ownership of that space changed many times—in that small city in dairy country, in tobacco country. But everyone still called it by the original name. All those layers of ordinary stories connected to it, between then and now, accumulated like the grit stuck to storm windows when you pull them out of storage to prepare for winter.

Susie Taylor’s Vigil (2024) explores that understanding of community over the course of seventeen linked stories: what’s lost, and what lingers, and what stays. How we hold and release, and how we relinquish and resist.

Bay Mal Verde in Newfoundland is the geographic setting for these stories, but anyone who’s grown up with hockey bags and seagulls, ATVs and Tim Hortons, will only need to add lupins and saltwater.

Taylor astutely captures the stifling loneliness that proliferates in small communities where difference is an insurmountable judgement.

Sometimes it’s obvious, as when a boy witnesses another boy “recover from more beatings, accidents, and humiliations that anyone else he knew.”

Mostly it permeates the collection in glimpses and details. The glow of a screen, blue in a house at night. A dealer telling a 15-year-old girl’s father that she owes $8K for drugs. A fake flower or strange-stuffed-animal keychain stuck into a chain-link fence behind the gas station.

Even Bay Mal Verde feels overshadowed, left at the alter to narrate the opening story: “There was a time when she herself was meant for greater things, until that sister of hers, St. John’s, started fluttering around and luring away all her suitors. Bay Mal Verde was left with a cathedral that sat on her hand like the engagement right form a called-off wedding. Expensive to insure with little resale value.”

Shifts in scale—from the settlement itself, to “a clump of boy” that “rolled around the neighbourhood together, to close single-voice narration like Ryan “walking onto a movie set of the biopic of his own life”—afford enough variation to create a sense of varied-but-connected experiences.

Shifts in time—a character dies in the second story, and two stories later is in the sixth grade—also secure that sense of a shared foundation. Landmarks and depots, desire paths and events: the residents of Bay Mal Verde are multi-dimensional and their perspectives are diverse, even as they navigate shared spaces and witness one another’s lives abruptly changing (or halting) or proceeding with deliberate-almost-painful sameness.

As readers progress through the collection, they slowly become immersed in the community as well (albeit in a come-from-away sense). And we recognise that Susie Taylor is providing just enough information about each character to afford readers to make their own evaluations and draw their own conclusions.

We can see who is lying, when she says she didn’t recognise the perp. We see someone see a body and keep the information quiet. We see a figure near the slushy machines and we’re not sure what to make of it either—whether it’s actually there, or just slushy fumes.

There’s a point in one story where a character breaks into a house by pulling at a rip in a window-screen and sliding into a basement window, cutting themselves in the course of events, noting the rend—noting that the pain from the rend hadn’t yet registered.

Susie Taylor’s storytelling resides in that space. Between the inevitable and the irretrievable, pain just a heartbeat apart.

She says: You know the place, where it is and what it’s called. I don’t have to explain that to you.