Lowfield by Mark Sampson | The Miramichi Reader

Over the last few years, PEI has been the focus of innovative and humourous novels, such as Steven Mayoff’s The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief (2023) and my own Unidentified man at left of photo (2020). Though neither of us are from PEI, we’re well acquainted with it. Mark Sampson was born there and regularly returns to it from his home in Toronto to visit friends and family. He presents his version of the Island’s pastoral sheen through a subgenre of horror that features a haunted house situated in an isolated place.

Not far from the red-gabled house that’s inherited by a troubled RCMP officer on leave lies the abandoned village of Lowfield, a settlement missing from local books and old maps. Set in 1995, before the Confederation Bridge has been completed, well before cell phones, and with email still new, Lowfield operates in the dim light recognizable to readers of, say, Stephen King’s It. Riley Fuller is the officer who is ferried over (allusions and hints start early) from New Brunswick to claim Applegarth, a house he only recently learned that he was heir to.

At first sight, it appears in good shape despite having not been lived in for decades. What looked like mould, for instance, vanishes soon after Fuller makes his first visit. This calls to mind Walter de la Mere’s subtly eerie story “All Hallows” from the mid-1920s. A weary traveller arrives at a seldom-visited church whose sole occupant, it seems, is its talkative verger who reveals, among other things, that the church is far from crumbling despite its age. “Why, I am speaking not of dissolution, sir, but of repairs, restorations. Not decay, strengthening. Not a corroding loss, an awful progress.” In Lowfield not only does the house refurbish itself, but the garden soon fills with fast-growing crops, including eggplant, of which Sampson makes much in a memorable dinner scene involving Fuller and two journalists who could be friends, if he really wanted that.

What would a horror tale be without old documents lying around to help with exposition? Fuller fitfully reads diaries left in the house’s library that tell of odd happenings from years ago involving his ancestors and their beliefs, though he prefers to be willfully ignorant, “avoiding the diaries… since learning… well, I’ve already said what I learned.” Readers will wonder why he’s of two minds about fleeing the place, but it’s because he’s too damaged by his past to leave. When he sets out, alone, to find Lowfield, which is easy to do on land if not in local history books—“Whatever happened in Lowfield that year [1863] was not publicly recorded” —the hold the house has over him increases. Old people who witnessed peculiar things and a younger generation who believed stories from their parents and grandparents fill out more of the sordid past of Applegarth. Events multiply, there’s violence and death, and the ending is not a conclusion, more a prelude to a potential next chapter.

Underlying the dark spirit that manifests itself in different locales and ways is an embodiment of Evil Incarnate that’s bloodthirsty and all-encompassing, with sway over the materials and animals of this world. Fuller initially opposes it, as best he can, with his mind and will. Nothing mystical or faith based for him. He’s bound to fail, hollow as he is, alone as he is, despite the friendship offered by the two journalists. In It the children (and later, their adult versions) share a bond of belief in each other and in their ability to collectively rise above individual limitations. They possess a goodness found, at least in literature, in teenagers on the cusp of adulthood. Their weapons are rudimentary, but they are a band. In Lowland, the team of teenage females (somewhat underdeveloped characters) who attack the domain of Evil with guns and guts are fuelled by solidarity with others of their gender who have disappeared or been assaulted by a rash of male criminal activity since Fuller and the house met. It would be a mistake to say more that would reveal what occurs, but simply put, the materialistic qualities of this world prove insufficient to triumph in a way that creates security.

Mark Sampson has portrayed ugly circumstances and scenarios before, as in Sad Peninsula (2014). Here, I don’t know if he’s just having fun with familiar tropes or showing how the absence of faith in something higher than worldly beliefs can’t vanquish Evil. Despite the occasional creak of tired machinery, this novel will disturb easily jangled nerves. Any Canadian television producer looking for a CanLit, Canadian-set limited series should option Lowfield right away. Despite the temptation, don’t call it Riley of Red Gables.

***

Walter de la Mere, “All Hallows” (from Best Stories of Walter de la Mere, ebook pub. by Rare Treasures):

“Why, I am speaking not of dissolution, sir, but of repairs, restorations. Not decay, strengthening. Not a corroding loss, an awful progress. I could show you places—and chiefly obscured from direct view and difficult of close examination, sir, where stones lately as rotten as pumice and as fretted as a sponge have been replaced by others fresh-quarried—and nothing of their kind within twenty miles.”

Mark Sampson is the author of the novels Off Book and Sad Peninsula, as well as the short story collection The Secrets Men Keep. His fiction, poetry and reviews have appeared in many journals across Canada, including The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, PRISM international, This magazine, QWERTY and FreeFall. Palimpsest Press released Weathervane in 2016. Originally from Prince Edward Island, he now lives and writes in Toronto.

Publisher: Now or Never Publishing (April 15th, 2025)
Paperback: 8″ x 5″ | 347 pp
ISBN: 9781989689813