Striking a very different note, there's Susie Moloney's Bastion Falls (Key Porter, 304 pages, $19.95 paper), a novel in the horror genre. If there were such a thing as a classic Canadian horror fantasy, this would surely be it: People stuck in a small northern town when it begins to snow. And snow. And snow. People closed in and closed off, growing more claustrophobic and isolated by the hour. And then, one by one, people killed by ominous dark entities.

Moloney manipulates the horror genre well, understanding that the worst horror resides not in nature but in the human heart.