Sheldon Currie came to national attention with the film version of his short story “The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum,” and with the publication of the novel, which he wrote to provide additional material for the script. This new collection, The Story So Far…, offers a look at Currie’s work up to and including “The Miners’ Museum” as well as some of his more recent stories.

Many of the themes and concerns that are fully realized in “The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum” also emerge in Currie’s earlier stories; the life of Cape Breton’s mining communities, the Catholic church, poverty, love, and loss. Most striking, however, is the author’s preoccupation with the human body as the site of both death and disfigurement, and redemption and enlightenment.

In “The Lovers,” a man contemplates adultery with his beautiful and mysterious secretary who exposes her breast to him and then asks him to imagine someone chopping it off with a knife. The image of the severed breast ultimately leads him to consider the full implications of his actions, the impossibility of separating one act from its wider context.

Currie’s earlier stories have a fantastic, fable-like quality with enigmatic figures appearing from nowhere to resolve a crisis or engender an epiphany. However, his implacable drive towards neat closure tends to diminish his characters, and it is only a third of the way into the collection that he really hits his stride.

“The Accident” and “The Party” are wonderful precursors to “The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum,” exploring an emotional, geographical, and cultural terrain similar to that found in the story of Margaret MacNeil and Neil Currie. In each of these stories, death and physical injury are the constant presences in the lives of miners’ children, and the attitude of the Catholic church towards the dangers of the coal pit seems to sanction the system, which treats human life so casually.

When Currie keeps his characters in concrete, recognizable situations, the results are magical; horror is tinged with humour, the mundane enlivened with the irresistible rhythm of his prose, and expletives are as lyrical as poetry in the mouths of his Glace Bay protagonists. As the portrait of a writer’s development, The Story So Far… reveals the gathering momentum of Currie’s talent and whets the appetite for his next collection.