Toss Raymond, the narrator of Michael Helm’s first novel, The Projectionist, is the kind of hero that takes a while to warm up to. But immediately unlikable heroes are something of an honoured literary tradition that does not necessarily mean bad things for the book as a whole – think of Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom or even Holden Caulfield. Were those guys huggable right off the bat? But they, like Toss Raymond, win us over in the end, and The Projectionist is an able and clever vehicle for this transformation.

Helm gets the main ingredients right: his characters are finely detailed, the dialogue crisp, and the pace avoids any soggy digressions. And Helm, Saskatchewan born and educated, apparently knows his setting too. He describes the prairie as, yes, wide and beautiful, but it is also a place where “sometimes even the blue-sky faithful get bored and look hopefully upward for the approach of lightning or funnel clouds.”

Toss Raymond is neither “blue-sky faithful” nor outright bored, but things aren’t going particularly well for him in Mayford: his wife left him a year ago, the town remembers his public attack on her suspected lover using a lawn ornament as weapon, and he has now taken up with Dewey, the manager of The Palace cinema and an all-around shit disturber. Raymond’s position as a high school teacher is further threatened by police suspicions that he had a hand in a series of criminal activities (break and enters, the planting of dynamite sticks) which are in fact the actions of his delinquent cousin. To make matters worse, his friend Dewey has decided it would be a good idea to start rumours about a werewolf and “valley madman” running around town at night disemboweling cows.

But as much as The Projectionist is a comic novel that lampoons small town politics, it is also a poignant story about home: losing it, returning to it, making it your own. And although Helm’s writing can occasionally feel a little overworked, the funny lines more wise-ass than wise, he can also deliver sustained moments of absolute clarity and grace, particularly when he peels back his hero’s jokey veneer to show a real man, lost somewhere between the end of youth and the onset of middle age, trying to make the dot on the map where he finds himself a place where he belongs.