The Exalted Company of Roadside Martyrs

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Metaphysical phenomena collide with earthy black humor in this pair of
novellas by Warren Cariou. Both novellas are set in and around Windfall,
a small Saskatchewan town that (like Cariou’s main characters) is
slowly disintegrating under the weight of its own history. The title of
the book reflects the fact that in each of these novellas, the main
character serves as a “minister.”

In the first story, “The Shrine of Badger King,” a member of the
Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly thinks he has a good chance for
re-election until he finds himself fighting candidates from both the
living and the dead. In the second story, “Lazarus,” a spiritually
fatigued Roman Catholic priest yearns to run off with another man’s
wife, but inadvertently loses both the woman he loves and the last mote
of his faith when he accidentally brings her loathsome husband back to
life.

Despite Cariou’s affinity for supernatural occurrences, his stories
have a palpable lived-in ambiance. His prose makes the reader smell the
stale socks in a rural rectory or hear the despairing whine of a paper
shredder as a politician struggles to cover his tracks. Cariou also does
not flinch from matching the sacred with the profane. In the first
story, a cheap leg garter serves as a martyr’s halo on a roadside
shrine. In the second tale, one of Cariou’s most hilarious paragraphs
draws an extended comparison between a confessional booth and an
outhouse.

Both novellas are intelligent, funny, and provocative, but momentum
occasionally stalls in the first story as the minister shifts back and
forth from being victim to villain. In the second tale, the narrator
finds his stride in the opening sentence and never falters until he
crosses the finish line.