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National Post

Canadian author Giles Blunt trades thrillers for chilling love story

Novelists who deliver a profound sense of place in their writings are worth their weight in gold. Article content Take Giles Blunt, for example. His lauded John Cardinal thrillers were compelling studies in character about the personal and professional crises facing a dedicated northern Ontario cop as he struggled to navigate his way through a dangerously imperfect world. However, they were also anchored to a vividly realized landscape, black flies and all, drawn from Blunt's own North Bay childhood. Article content Article content Indeed, it was a wintry return visit as an adult that led to Blunt's first Cardinal novel, Forty Words For Sorrow. He was walking along the shores of Lake Nipissing during a near whiteout. 'You could just see the faint outline of this little island with an abandoned mine shaft on it, and I thought — what an eerie place to find a body.' With that thought he was on his way as a top-selling novelist. Article content Years later, Blunt is still talking about the importance of place in his creative imagination, only this time it's somewhere quite different — in this case New York State's mountainous Adirondack region and more specifically the community of Saranac Lake as it existed more than a century ago. Article content It's the setting for his latest novel, Bad Juliet, a doom-haunted story of obsessive love, and if it sometimes takes on the aura of a fevered dream — well, this is the sort of period setting that invites it and compels one to read on. Article content Giles Blunt Article content Article content The village began casting a spell over Blunt and his wife the first time they visited it several years ago. 'I couldn't wait to set a story there,' he says now. Article content Saranac Lake was once a renowned centre for the treatment of tuberculosis — so renowned, in fact, that when its original sanatorium could no longer meet patient needs, the entire area would evolve into a 'sanatorium' with local residents turning their homes into 'cure cottages' overseen by doctors, nurses, and public health agencies. Article content 'I was just fascinated by the history,' Blunt tells Postmedia from his Toronto home. In the strange story he has to tell, he reveals a Saranac Lake so economically stable that it can support gourmet restaurants and live theatre. Blunt can still feel the past reaching out whenever he visits. 'Private citizens had modified houses to accommodate patients — for example adding portions so patients could sit inside in the dry healthy air. You can visit today and the modified houses are still there — what an amazing thing.' Article content It's to this place, in the midst of a TB epidemic that is killing 90,000 Americans a year that the book's central figure, a failed young academic named Paul Gascoyne, comes to to eke out a living tutoring patients in literature and the craft of writing while nursing his grievances over his treatment by the wider world. His encounter with Sarah, a mysterious young woman who escaped death during the sinking of the Lusitania only to be facing mortality again through illness, draws him into an emotional drama for which he is ill prepared.