David Huebert (Nicola Davison)

At heart, Oil People is a story about adolescence – its volatility and uncertainties, the questions and intense learning curve. David Huebert’s debut novel stars Jade Armbruster, who is soon to be 14 and resides in a shabby southern Ontario town (“almost all white, and most people were openly racist”) where “Papa Don’t Preach” rules the airwaves and “Reagan’s America, Star Wars America” headlines the “radioactive” news.

Jade is sweltering during a heat wave in May 1987, and “wilting, wheeling, dumb as love” for Marc, he of the rat-tail, pigeon-toed walk, and tragic history – a mother rumoured to have “died alone in her apartment, her body pecked away by her own pet birds.” Jade, “pale and red-headed with a weird left eye” by her own assessment, hopes to be a doctor; Marc likes to dissect worms. The relationship might be a keeper.

Elsewhere, Jade’s older sister has turned politically rebellious, her parents fight and drink too much, and at school she dreads a mortal enemy, Thea Mayweather, who calls Jade “Leak,” and whose antagonism builds by the week.

At home, Jade’s weak-hearted dad expects to sell the family house, while her mother – teeth blackened by wine and prone to “spells” – is adamant about staying. With “black gunk” and mushrooms in the basement, “taxidermied birds,” charred walls and burnt rafters (death by fire is part of family lore), and a generally decrepit appearance, their home – the Canadian Petroleum Legacy Museum, a “traditional Gothic style” on Legacy Lane, no less – is a historical repository, a remnant of the Lambton County oil rush in the 1860s; oil pumps still run there.

A “story of remnants and revenants, of things that bubble up,” Oil People’s palpable atmosphere makes the heat wave on everybody’s lips seem mild. Jade notices subterranean oozing, fogged-over windows, toxic water, and strange apparitions she can’t explain. As she passes “days drunk with Marc, bloated with him” – and as her birthday, first menstruation, and the solstice approach – Huebert piles on more and more Gothic horror elements to an otherwise affecting and quirky portrait of adolescence. Readers might pick out echoes of Carrie, The Ring, Stranger Things, and The Haunting of Hill House. For me, Francis Bacon’s oils of Pope Innocent X sprang to mind.

Sporadically, Huebert (author of the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction–winning Chemical Valley) inserts external perspectives – that range from an 1862 Scientific American article and ancestral diaries to screenplay excerpts and a newspaper exposé – within the pages of Jade’s narration. Lively and interesting, these are an inventive way to introduce exposition about oil’s legacy without the drag that excess exposition can produce.

A distinct tonal shift is evident in the other significant sections of the book, which are set in the mid-19th century. Huebert’s account of Jade and Thea’s rivalrous forebears grows wavering and hallucinatory in a huffed gasoline kind of way. Akin to the wildly idiosyncratic and lushly poetic style found in novels like George Elliott Clarke’s George and Rue, Michael Crummey’s The Innocents, and John Vigna’s No Man’s Land, it suggests Canadian history as a fetid, smothering nightmare.

In contrast to Jade’s candid and plainspoken narration – “Was this just what it was like to be thirteen and have a crush, a boyfriend?” – Huebert’s evocation of the “thieved and punctured lands” at Oil Springs, Ontario, circa 1860 suggests Hieronymus Bosch by way of J-horror: “In the swamp of Enniskillen, babies dozed in hollow logs while the gumbo bubbled and glugged and the speculators hove knee and crotch into the baffle of its seeking”; “Fumigant spilling over the muck and gum beds. Insects buzzing thick in the bush, making sieve of sky as rattlers feasted on rabbits and women clutched their guts in gardens”; “Your sister over the bucket, shitting a watery swamp and in that brown fluid the worms wiggle and turn, knots of them foaming together, and you do not mean to look in the soiled ring at the cleft of her.”

It’s no surprise that the gruesome Victorian tale of greed is awash in afflictions, bad faith, rivalry, deception, and madness.

“We’re oil people. It’s in our blood,” Jade’s mother tells her. It’s a woeful fate. As Jade wonders whether she is “simply poisoned, merely mad,” and the St. Clair River births a “gelatinous offspring,” the fallen world around her tumbles further. And Jade – “a green, glowing by-product of the country’s shame, [her] family’s legacy, commerce and greed and territory” – soon comes to experience the brunt of those extraordinary forces.