No Quarter

NO QUARTER
By John Jantunen

Who knows what horrors lurk beneath the surface of Northern Ontario’s cottage country?

Perhaps George Cleary does. George is the former publisher of the Tildon Chronicle and author of a series of twelve melodramatic novels ripe with an excess of sex and violence. One of these novels is even titled No Quarter. It seems that life imitates art in the town of Tildon, and Cleary’s “Fictions” have a prophetic cast.

Unfortunately, George soon dies, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript for a new novel offering cryptic clues to Tildon’s dark history and fiery fate. So it falls to reporter Deacon Riis, George’s adopted son, to figure out what’s behind a recent crime wave involving people from the top and the bottom of Tildon’s food chain.

At the top we have the uber-rich Wane family, enjoying a life of Chandleresque decadence in a gated lakeside mansion. At the bottom there’s René Descartes, an ex-con living in a trailer and trying to get by doing pick-up manual labour. Remarkably, their paths will cross. Sparks will fly.

Jantunen’s previous novel, A Desolate Splendor, had a similar taste for violence set in an unforgiving, apocalyptic landscape. With No Quarter he has added more self-reflective literary elements. In its end is its beginning, and the story closes in upon itself while still leaving key questions unanswered. There are also hints at some deeper, metafictional or mystical connection between George Cleary’s Fictions and what’s going on in Tildon, though this is finally left up in the air.

No Quarter is presented as the first book of The Tildon Chronicles, which helps explain much of its elaborate, in-depth world building. Readers would be advised to keep track of the names and family genealogies as they go along. There is a lot of back story to get through and many detours into stories within stories, not all of them as yet fully digested.

There’s an ungainliness and energy to No Quarter, its unevenness being the result of an ambitious reach. How far that reach extends remains to be seen. It’s hard to make out the road ahead, but it seems as though the twisted chronicles of this town have a way to go.

Notes:
Review first published online December 26, 2018.