The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien
I stepped into the world of “The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien” and needed to hold on tight. Set in the 1900s, I entered into the distinct setting of Cobalt, Ontario, a mining town teeming with a violent and rough population, in the throes of characters in movement. Mud and the threat of violence covers everything, the language is rough, and Western. Amongst this historic setting of guns, crime and the raping of resources, Griffin layers in a plotline of mystery and the supernatural.
There is Lucy, a tough and rough-around-the-edges young woman who is searching for her missing sister. Right off, she encounters a prospector in the bush searching for silver. The plot kicks off with an accusation that the prospector is the one to have taken her sister and she brings him down into the mud with a buckshot bullet. A woman with a sharp-tongue, she is the inciting incident.
There is also Modesto O’Brien, a fortune teller and self-professed detective. His plot arc crossroads with another young woman when she hires him to help find her sister and to murder a man. Modesto finds out that this young woman’s name is Lucy and she is on the run. All of the characters carry a past and these lives become enmeshed as the plot thickens.
Griffin plays with mystery and even horror by layering mystique around the sisters’ backstory, Modesto’s motivation, and the question of the reality of a supernatural creature lurking in the woods.
I wondered how everything would coalesce in a plot climax, how would these loose ends be tied together? If they even would be? Push and pull, the sisters and Modesto’s character arcs are hinged on one terrorizing antagonist, Tommy Coffin.
The concept of haunting is carved out in explicit and physical tones, but as the novel turns in and on itself, Griffin ushers in an unsettling shift of trauma, identity and the way the past inhabits the present.
Brit Griffin is the author of the climate-fiction Wintermen trilogy, published by Latitude 46, a northern Ontario press known for supporting regionally rooted voices and environmentally conscious storytelling. In addition to her fiction, Griffin has contributed essays, reflections, and articles to a range of publications, and her work has been featured and reviewed in connection with Latitude 46’s growing catalogue of place-based literature. She spent many years working as a researcher with the Timiskaming First Nation, an Algonquin community in northern Quebec. Now based in Cobalt, Ontario, she is the mother of three adult daughters and balances her time between writing and tending to her yard.
I have engaged with Latitude 46’s catalogue through previous reviews, including “The Donoghue Girl” by Kim Fahner, “Joe Pete” by Ian McCulloch, “Birch and Jay” by Allister Thompson, “The Stones of Burren Bay” by Emily De Angelis, “The Art of Floating” by Melanie Marttila, and now, “The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien” by Brit Griffin. I have situated these works within the landscapes and cultural textures of Northern Ontario, exploring themes of climate anxiety, intergenerational memory, and land-based identity while highlighting the press’s role in amplifying regional voices in contemporary Canadian literature. “The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien” is a text that contributes to the tone of this press and Northern literary community.
The setting in “The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien,” was distinct and enrapturing. Cobalt is teeming with mania of those consumed in striking it rich, the town’s mineral rush has attracted a population boom of all personality types. The men carry shotguns and frequent brothels. They drink and play cards. They fight. Bordering the human chaos are the stretches of forest that give the novel a supernatural eeriness. The forest witnesses, and alludes to judgement of manmade horrors. A forest reaped and pillaged, the water taken for granted, the prerogative, to mine the land as cheaply as possible. The land will not forget.
Other reviewers have deemed the novel “tough to categorize.” Blending mystery and the supernatural within a historical and ‘Western setting, “The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien” examines crucial overarching themes of haunting as memory, identity and selfhood and psychological versus the supernatural, especially from an eco-critical lens, the land as an archive. Griffin’s writing pulls it off.
“The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien” is ideal for readers of literary fiction with a speculative edge. Also, readers drawn to psychological or ambiguous “hauntings” and those interested in Canadian Northern literature.
Thank you to Brit Griffin, Latitude 46 Publishing and River Street Writing for a complimentary copy in request for an honest review.
