Characters from Matt Cohen's fictional town of Salem, Ontario, began appearing ten years ago in the short story "Country Music," which was included in Cohen's 1972 collection, Columbus and the Fat Lady. "Country Music" builds to the death of Pat Frank, and so in a chronological sense follows the four subsequent novels in the quartet that began with The Disinherited (1974), and continued through The Colours of War (1977), and The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone (1978). The cyclical nature of Cohen's work over the past decade now seems complete: in a brief author's note to his new novel, Cohen … notes that "with Flowers of Darkness the impulse that started me writing The Disinherited has come full circle."

It has been an erratic circle, with characters from other novels popping in and out of scenes almost at random, mentioned briefly in one novel and developed into central figures in another. But...