The Mole Chronicles.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Brown’s first novel has about it a feeling of doom, as though something unpleasant is about to happen. The dermatological moles that are the subject of the story are threatening not only the lives of the nameless narrator and his sister, Lesley, but are also stigmata resulting from non-specific crimes and misdemeanours. Brown’s method is also non-specific as he moves his protagonist from Montreal to Vancouver and back again and riddles him with fears and portents. “I come to fear beaches and their hectares of topless flesh,” the young man says. “Spanish Banks becomes the Spanish Inquisition.… I see time-spotted corpses embalmed in salt.” Most of these fears are directly related to the moles; the threat of melanoma informs much of the novel’s plot. Dermatologists play some major roles from start to finish and, in fact, do even more—they come to represent environmental crusaders.

Brown’s narrative style is to tie short, first-person vignettes together with a running commentary involving comic book heroes (the Moleman), traffic patterns at Vancouver intersections, and even kidnapping. And though the book is short, Brown finds room to philosophize: “I see myself as lucky,” he says. “I’m cool. With it. In the know. Cooking with gas. I’ve traded my stigma for stigmata. My moles are only small brown metaphors. I could come to love the black spot which will grow big enough to take on the Mighty Thor and win….” Finally, the narrator and his sister come together, both victimized by rookie eco-terrorists with personal agendas.