I have to admit, I didn’t have reading a horror novel set in PEI on my list of things to do for 2025, but I enjoyed Lowfield by Mark Sampson. Riley Fuller is a traumatized officer on leave when he inherits and explores his family’s ancestral property, an old house known as Applegarth. But does Fuller own the house, or does the house own him? With some of the shows I stream leaving a trail of undeveloped ideas, a novel set largely in one location appealed.

Sampson is a skilled writer. There’s enough detail here for the lives of the characters to feel convincing and real, but not so much it’s overbearing or tedious. The story is set around 1995, and Fuller cranks up his computer and begins a journal, “Dear Diary, or Journal, or whatever the fuck you are.” He’s exploring the whole e-mail thing, which everyone seems to be getting. It’s a novel that reminded me of John Wyndham because Wyndham is also capable of grounding his characters in a believable world as a way to help him sell and explore extraordinary ideas.

Sampson grew up on PEI and I can only assume that helps him add convincing detail. When an old journal in the house refers to “P. E. Island,” it feels very real. Characters say imperfect things and act imperfectly, but the book is also served well by its description. In a nightmare about jellyfish they’re “an army of glutinous, wine-dark blobs undulating in the salty waves, trailing their stinging tendrils behind them like torn skirts.”

I was surprised at some of the lines the book crosses, but it’s in the name of showing the corrupting, appalling influence of the house as it seizes Fuller with its own goals. It’s in the name of giving the book a potency it wouldn’t otherwise have, and the suggestion toxic masculinity is both exhausting and suffocating is not, wisely, spelled out for the reader. The house can repair itself even as corrupting visions about using others grip Fuller. Fair warning, the book finds its way to grotesque moments, and while that isn’t normally my cup of tea because I don’t have a strong stomach, in the hands of a skilled writer it has a purpose. I think there should be room in literary culture for horror and SF that examines large, universal ideas. All this is blended with some suggestions about the history of the province and the value of journalism.

There’s even a dash of literary criticism here when Fuller is sent an “impenetrable,” and “baffling” book of Canadian poetry. It contributes to Riley concluding “I hate reading,” but while I was tempted to suggest this was a heavy-handed moment — it does take the reader out of the story to some extent — I wondered if there’s meant to be an implied connection between Lowfield (a location eventually detailed in the book) and lowbrow, so that overall, the novel is perhaps suggesting some of the fault is in Fuller for not wanting to meet a book of poetry halfway.

I think there’s an argument to be made that in terms of theme, subtlety can be trusted to have more impact on the reader, in the end. The way these themes and ideas are not spelled out at a time direct statements are becoming more common is part of the value of Lowfield, which I’m very glad to have read.