Tamas Dobozy (Henry Dobozy)

Stasio, the brilliant and powerful new novel from prize-winning writer Tamas Dobozy (Siege 13, Ghost Geographies), opens with bloodshed. “The children were killed first,” the novel begins, with a brutal understatement that characterizes the book. “Lined up in ascending order of height on their knees facing the wall, hands tied to their ankles, gags in place.”

The observer of the crime scene is police detective Anthony de Stasio, whose attention quickly shifts from the butchery to its instrument: “an incredible weapon. Stasio could see that even through the scab that encased it. He was capable of that—separating what was beautiful from what was horrific—though he saw this not as a gift for fact but a personal flaw.”

This observation, particularly the contrast between plain facts and personal flaws, establishes the terms for a novel which exists – nay, thrives – in a grey terrain of contradictions and questions.

Cunningly labelled “a novel in three parts,” Stasio is composed of three novellas, each of which draw Stasio further away from the purported clarity of his police work, with its pursuit of facts, into dreamlike, haunted worlds of uncertainty. The opening section, “Steyr Mannlicher,” follows Stasio’s investigation into an execution-style group murder, but it quickly comes to focus on the titular firearm, a rifle that seems to have a history of leading its users into obsession and carnage. All of the previous owners, Stasio discovers, share two things: the initials “TD” and patterns of escalating violence.

Stasio is an isolated character. He has few connections on the police force, and has an ailing wife. His links to society are already fragile before the strangeness of the world begins to envelop him. The two subsequent novellas – “Photo Array” and “The Unaffiliated” – draw him further into this night-world, pulling the reader along with him.

While Stasio is ostensibly a contemporary crime novel (set in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, where Dobozy teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University), Dobozy approaches the work with an old-world European sensibility that incorporates elements of both noir and German Expressionism. A surreal quality enfolds the reader in this exploration of sleep deprivation and dream states, ghosts and visions, obsessions and coincidences, grief and guilt, deep-seated mystery and a grinding fatalism. It’s a glorious fever dream of a novel, resolutely dark but with a striking streak of humour running through it. Late in the novel, for example, Stasio’s partner (though one definitely not of his choosing) echoes Stasio’s closest confederate in the police, his captain (who becomes his lover): “Lefferts is right, you really are a terrible detective. Have you ever solved a case? Or do you just create a new case out of every case you’re involved with? Because that is how it seems to me: the crime you start out looking at is never as important as the crimes you find along the way.”

By that point, readers will be in full agreement: Stasio is a terrible cop, but the mysteries that he doesn’t solve seem of less importance than the mysteries in which he finds himself, or which he creates – these are puzzles that burrow into the very depths of human existence and the nature of reality itself. Stasio is a dizzying, compelling novel, a worthy addition to Dobozy’s already impressive oeuvre.