A book with bite
In her first work to be translated into English (by Pablo Strauss), Québec City-based poet, short story writer and novelist Mireille Gagné explores ecological and biological horror in the novella Horsefly.
This slim eco-thriller is split into three perspectives. The first follows entomologist Thomas in 1942, recruited by the Allied forces to test and develop biological weapons which could be spread by insects. He and other scientists are isolated on Grosse Île, a remote island in the St. Lawrence River.
In the same region of Québec, in 2024, lives Theodore, a somewhat shiftless young factory worker raised by his strict and emotionally distant grandfather Émeril. Theodore lives near the care home where Émeril is mistreated by the staff. News reports hint at a heatwave all across Québec that seems to coincide with a sharp spike in violence and inexplicable flights of rage.
Emilie Dumais photo
Mireille Gagné's latest was initially published in French in 2024 as Frappabord.
The third perspective is the first-person (or insect) point of view of a female horsefly who carefully stalks Theodore and knows how this young man, his grandfather and the heatwave are connected to Thomas and the experiments carried out in 1942.
After being bitten by the horsefly, Theodore becomes more impulsive and less apathetic, breaking Émeril out of the care home and taking him to the remote island where he once worked as a caretaker at a secret army base. Émeril's worsening dementia means he is often unable to tell the difference between the current moment and memories, and he begins to share memories that were never supposed to surface.
The sections narrated by the horsefly are short and sweet, mainly concerned with setting the atmosphere. The fly is a sensual creature; its sections are consumed with the sweaty, bloody and vaguely erotic focus on biting Theodore and consuming his blood. This brevity works well and sets an ominous tone for the longer, more narrative-focused sections.
A tight focus is used again when the narrative follows Thomas in 1942. Isolated not only on the remote Grosse Île army base, he is also forbidden from discussing his research with the other scientists, as they are forbidden such discussions with him. Tasked with finding an appropriate vector to spread anthrax, Thomas becomes fixated on a particular species of horsefly which breeds in the St. Lawrence. The flies are particularly aggressive and abundant on the island, making them the perfect specimen for his experiments. But the flies' persistence and numbers make them effectively unmanageable, bringing great risk to everyone at the facility.
Theodore's sections are similarly compartmentalized and narrow in their scope, focusing purely on him and his small apartment and his spot on factory floor, branching out slightly once he takes Émeril from the care home, but the focus is less effective in this instance. Theodore's narrative is peppered with radio and news snippets describing a growing outbreak of rage and violence across Québec. While this would normally raise the stakes, the novella maintains a narrative distance from the outbreak, which is the main threat of the plot. While post-apocalyptic narratives often tighten their focus to individual stories to show the individual consequences of the larger scale happening, in Horsefly the threat to the world remains too vague to feel threatening.
While there is some revelation concerning the flies and Thomas's research which remains grounded in realism, the nebulous 'rage virus' idea has been used before — in, for example, Danny Boyle's film 28 Days Later or Paul Tremblay's novel Survivor Song. Horsefly is certainly not a zombie novel – it's doing something quite different – but the parallel remains.
Horsefly
There's a fascinating idea at the core of Horsefly, but the tight and limited focus of the narrative keeps the dread off in the distance. It's certainly thought-provoking — the sections of Second World War-era Québec are a highlight — but readers expecting more horror may find this novella light on tension.
Keith Cadieux is a Winnipeg writer and editor. His latest story collection Donner Parties and Other Anti-Social Gatherings is out now from At Bay Press. He also co-edited the horror anthology What Draws Us Near, published by Little Ghosts Books.
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