Read an Excerpt from Satellite Image, the New Novel from Michelle Berry

Avid readers who are fans of acclaimed author Michelle Berry will be thrilled to find her new novel on bookstore shelves. The prolific Peterborough-based writer has penned three story story collections and seven novels over her impressive career, and the latest work is another enthralling story that will keep readers enrapt throughout.

In the aptly and directly titled, Satellite Image (Wolsak & Wynn), a couple who are planning on fleeing the racket of the city for a small, sleepy town a few hours away find a startling discovery the night before the big move. While looking up their new property via a website that shares satellite images, they see what appears to be a body lying in their soon-to-be backyard. This is just the beginning of their strange journey. As the new homeowners begin to uncover the baffling and unnerving history of their house, and acclimate to odd social interactions and peculiarities of the local landscape, they realize that life in this particular small town may not be all that it seems.

Berry's novels are known for their surprising twists and turns, and all are page-turning delights from beginning to end. So, check out this free excerpt from this latest work and slip deeper into the mysteries that await in one eerily memorable fictional town.

Excerpt from Satellite Image by Michelle Berry

The day they moved in they met the sellers. An older couple, probably in their late seventies or eighties (Ginny and Matt both agreed that age becomes impossible to guess the older you get). 

Marina and her husband, Charles Smythe.

“Mr. and Mrs. Smythe are moving into an apartment, aren’t you?” The lawyer said, snapping her briefcase closed. “Downsizing.” She looked almost proud of the word, as if she’d just come up with it.

Charles said nothing. He looked sullenly at the floor. Marina smiled shyly and stared at Matt and Ginny. Matt felt she wasn’t blinking and he stared at her eyes until he saw them move. Charles looked angry. He was tall and had greyish skin. His skin colour was off like he was malnourished. His overall appearance was grey, in fact. Even his clothes were grey, as if faded from one too many washes. A short-sleeved faded black T-shirt and military-style blackish baggy pants with lots of pockets. There were dandruff flakes on his shoulders, Matt could see this from across the room. His movements were jerky. His eyebrows were so bushy that Matt thought they looked like caterpillars. Charles looked furious all through the meeting and kept looking down at the floor. Until he stopped looking at the floor and looked straight at Matt. Matt noticed his hands were twitching and there was a moth ball smell about. It was sad. Matt tried to talk to Charles but couldn’t get an answer from him. Not a word. Just a few grunts. 

Marina was only slightly different. Greyish, small, both soft and strong. Matt could see her legs were swollen and thick. She gave the impression of having come straight from a farm somehow. From a farm located somewhere in the past. Like Charles, she was faded-looking, washed out, dusty or sun-faded. Even her hair, sprinkled with grey, looked as if it was dusty. It was as if there was no definition in either of them, as if they were blurry or foggy, peering out of a mist. And, strangely for the month of August, she had big boots on. Marina was wearing a ratty floral dress, as unwashed-looking as Charles’s clothes. A holey, grey cardigan. Matt thought she looked like she had just stepped out of the Grapes of Wrath and he selfishly thought that, after all the money Matt and Ginny were paying them for their rundown house, the Smythes might have tried to look a little better. Especially since they were downsizing a lot. Matt asked them what their plans were for the future, was the apartment in Parkville or somewhere else? Was it smaller and more manageable, he asked? Did they have kids? Marina smiled slightly and nodded a lot for yes and shook her head for no, and Charles ignored everything. He grunted something to Marina about not wanting to move. “I told you,” Charles hissed and Marina shushed him. She looked tired of him and frustrated and nervous. 

“Malnourished?” Matt asked Ginny later, as they were unpacking boxes. “I thought they looked unwell.”

“I have no idea why they were so empty of emotion or life,” Ginny said. “I wish we never met. Now my opinion of the house is tainted with thoughts of them inside it.”

Matt agreed. “It does look slightly different now,” he said, tidying up their pizza box, flattening a packing box. “I’m sure, though, that will change as it becomes ours.” He then imagined Marina and Charles in his house, creeping around in their faded clothes, not talking to each other – silent, unhappy ghouls. 

The lawyer that evening had them all sign the papers and then Marina and Charles left. They didn’t turn around to look over at their old house at all, they didn’t stop on the street to take one last glance before getting into their truck. Marina sat in the passenger seat looking straight ahead and Charles started their truck and they drove off. Matt had turned away from watching them at the front window and looked at Ginny, who had popped open some prosecco. They drank out of the bottle, giving their one unpacked glass to the lawyer, who had never heard of prosecco and kept calling it “bubbly” – and then she gathered all her papers and left too. On the way down the front lawn she pulled up the large, red Realty Plus sign and stuffed that in her car. “I’ll drop it off with your agent,” she said. The smell of perfume followed her out the door.

“Funny,” Ginny said after she left, “She called the espresso I offered earlier ‘expresso.’ And she didn’t like it. She took one sip and gagged. Said it was bitter. And she also called our chimney a ‘chimbley.’ We’re going to have to learn a new language in this town.”

Matt and Ginny spent the rest of that first night moving their furniture in from the rental truck out front. For such a small person, Ginny was strong when determined. Matt maneuvered the large things himself or put towels under some furniture to drag. A lot of their furniture needed to be reassembled, but that could be done in stages. And in a few weeks the new things they ordered to fill the house would come.

And now Matt is perched on a plastic box at the dining-room table with their first guests, the neighbours, listening to Ginny tell the satellite image story and suddenly noticing that everything around him feels charged and off. Everything feels suddenly cold. He shivers. As if a wind has passed through the house. Something feels different. It feels like someone has come into the house and moved through the room. 

Matt gets up from his box, just as Ginny gets to the description of the body in the yard. “It was white. There was a stain of blood on the side of the stomach,” she says, and Matt goes into the living room, nothing – then into the kitchen – still nothing. But he can feel something moving. Wind? Air? Is a window open? Matt checks the front door, closed, and the patio door (he avoids looking out at the body’s place off the porch). The patio door is open, the screen closed, but there isn’t much of a breeze out. And whatever breeze there is is warm, not cold. Matt notices the gate to the ravine behind the house is slightly open, but that shouldn’t make a difference to the feeling in the house. He knows there are no other windows open. There can’t be. Most of them won’t open, they are all painted shut or they have heavy storm windows. In fact, Matt and Ginny have been missing September air and cool breezes. The window at the top of the stairs, in the upstairs hallway, is actually the only one that opens and Matt knows he closed it in case of rain before the dinner party. There was that feeling of rain earlier. And that’s the feeling he has now, like a cool breeze, like rain is coming.

But when Matt looks up the staircase he can see the window at the top is open. Wide open. The latch must be broken. He walks up the stairs and shuts it and looks around. The hallway is dark, so is their bedroom. Matt shrugs and heads back downstairs. He’s thinking of using a quote to everyone in the dining room. One he read recently when his class was studying Dickens: “For the night-wind has a dismal trick of wandering round and round a building of that sort, and moaning as it goes; and of trying, with its unseen hand, the windows and the doors; and seeking out some crevices by which to enter,” but when he re-enters the dining room everyone is sitting completely still. No one is moving at all. Pat’s spaghetti fork is paused in mid-air. Ginny has finished the story and is smiling, mouth open wide, as if she’s just told a joke. Her eyes, though, look scared and confused. But no one seems to understand the joke and they all at once turn and look at Matt as he enters, and he knows that the expression on their faces isn’t one of humour, or even surprise at what Ginny has told them about the body on the ground in the satellite image. It is one of fear.

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Michelle Berry is the author of seven novels and three books of short stories. Her books have been shortlisted, longlisted and won awards. Her writing has been optioned for film several times and she has been published in the UK. Berry was a reviewer for the Globe and Mail for many years. She teaches at the University of Toronto in the Continuing Education department and has also taught at Toronto Metropolitan University, Humber College and Trent University. She has been on the board of PEN Canada and the Writers’ Union of Canada and on the Authors’ Advisory Group of the Writers’ Trust of Canada. For five years Berry owned and operated her own independent bookstore in Peterborough, Ontario, called Hunter Street Books.