Review of The Haunting of L by Howard Norman: “…Norman’s novels are hard to like. Starting in 1987 with The Northern Lights, each novel has featured a taciturn, antisocial male protagonist, as disconnected from his own inner life as he is from the people around him. Norman’s landscapes mirror the emptiness of the characters who inhabit them: this American writer is unique in setting his books in the bleakest regions of Canada, from the expanses of northern Manitoba to turn-of-thecentury Newfoundland. And his prose is as inhospitable as the terrain. Bumpy in pace and flat in texture, it goes down awkwardly, like something hard to chew.” The New Republic